The Irish radio documentary has tended, in recent years, to stray far from the current-affairs support role with which the word "documentary" is historically associated. It's a trend that's hard enough to explain, especially since RTE television has, by and large, taken shelter safely against the winds of TV docu-trash blowing so hard from east and west; Prime Time has continued to assume that it's entirely legitimate to devote 30 minutes or more of airtime (and plenty of cash and person-power) to a journalistic exploration behind the soundbite version of a news story.
Radio documentaries here haven't been so much trashy as personal; or arty; or historical; or atmospheric; or evocative; or all of the above. And while these tendencies suggest the radio documentary is seen as increasingly marginal in terms of reaching a large audience, much of the work has been memorable and some of it genuinely superb.
That's not just from RTE either. Among the best work I've heard lately, listening to programmes part-funded by the Independent Radio and Television Commission (IRTC) New Adventures in Broadcasting scheme, is a documentary from Wexford, Forgotten People (South East Radio), that's personal, arty, historical, atmospheric and evocative. It's even a bit passionate besides.
In Forgotten People, producer/presenter Margaret Hawkins follows Patricia Quinn in her quest to unearth the true story of a long-dead great-aunt, Rose. A combination of oral history, eventually-discovered documentation and some educated surmise reveals a miserable tale of Ireland in the early 20th century.
It seems Rose, a woman in her 30s, perhaps with an out-of-wedlock birth already behind her in 1907, was forced to marry by her family, literally pushed to the altar in floods of tears. It would be fair to say the marriage didn't exactly click: Rose may have refused to live with her new "husband"; she certainly was committed first to the workhouse, then to the asylum (diagnosis: "melancholia"). On the bright side, her ordeal didn't last long: she was dead within months, probably of TB. (Some 17 per cent of Irish deaths at this time were caused by tuberculosis, we heard.)
Patricia Quinn, making not-too-much of some remarkable coincidences between dates and events in her own life and in Rose's, is heard not just discovering the truth, but also discovering the forgotten, unmarked, unconsecrated graveyard beside the asylum where Rose and who knows how many others were left in death. Her successful efforts to have it tidied up and blessed provided what little good news this quite beautiful documentary had to offer.
However, radio documentary has other goodies going for it. As if to prove that the old-fashioned Irish current-affairs documentary is not as dead as poor old Rose, RTE brought us not one but two of them this week.
Moving (RTE Radio 1, Wednesday) was a Tiger tale. Late last year, Edel and Fergus McAllister, middle-class thirtysomethings with two young children, decided to abandon their increasingly cramped, gardenless two-up two-down in central Dublin and - property prices, traffic, childcare being what they are - chose to ditch the city entirely. The programme followed their move to Westport, Co Mayo (and a spacious three-bed with garden).
Michael O'Kane threw in a few nice bits of music, but largely he let matter-of-fact, gas-altogether Fergus and Edel tell their story, along with "actuality" from the chronologically unfolding events of their uprooting. Few listeners will cry for the McAllisters - they're renting out the wee Dublin house at a tidy profit - but their story made fine listening. Technically excellent (I love the sound of moving furniture) and personally involving, it had the distinct ring of more-of-this-please.
Joe Murray's slightly arty bank holiday documentary, Silent Fields (RTE Radio 1, Monday), was a foot-and-mouth programme with unabashed, unmitigated and more-than-a-little-sentimental sympathy for the farmers. Or, to be more specific, for the farmers whose sheep once roamed over the Cooley mountains in Co Louth. No mention here of the discrepancies in sheep numbers with which farmers from this selfsame locality were being slapped around elsewhere on the airwaves; all we got here was a sense of an ancient craft, timeless relationships and irreplaceable loss.
We heard a (very) local historian talking about the Cooley peninsula's dual sources of work and sustenance: the fish in the sea and the sheep on the hills. And for how long had this been going on for people living in these parts? "Since the ice melted," he said. It's not everyone who has such a confident sense of pre-history, and it made for an extraordinarily resonant assertion: from the last Ice Age to the year 2001, there have been sheep on these mountains, and now they're gone.
Urban folk are rightly inclined to raise an eyebrow at suggestions that farmers are sentimental about their animals - sure, they're going to send them to be butchered anyway, right?
What Murray's documentary did, by giving Cooley people 45 minutes to elaborate on their feelings, was to make the sentiments clearer: while there was some wistfulness about this or that individual ewe - who would be around for some years, after all - the farmers were really attached to their sheep collectively, not as cuddly individuals but as flocks and bloodlines.
You got the sense that there was genuinely something more than compo-talk in the reminiscences about the care that went into developing a hybrid sheep that perfectly suited these mountains. And there was certainly sense in the notion that sheep with ancestral lines here for years and generations had developed a sense of the place that farmers (and dogs) will have to work very bloody hard for a long time to instill in their replacements.
The former governor of New York, Hugh Carey, has a sense of Ireland that strikes me as pretty cuddly and ahistorical, whatever his role as one of the lesser progenitors of the peace process. On Today with Pat Kenny (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday), this sweet-voiced old Irish-American got an easy bank-holiday ride from the presenter, and by and large you could hardly have expected anything different.
However, there was one piece of typically American deaf-dumb-and-blindness that really merited at least a kick under the studio table. Carey, a long-time and honourable opponent of the death penalty (albeit in a state where that has been a politically sustainable position), was asked about Timothy McVeigh. No, Carey didn't support executing McVeigh, but he did understand why people regarded him as exceptionally "evil".
For example, Carey told us, McVeigh had referred to the children killed in the Oklahoma City bombing as "collateral damage".
Now, really, where do you suppose McVeigh, a decorated veteran of the US war on Iraq, picked up a disgusting, evil concept like that?
hbrowne@irish-times