New Ireland, the Ireland of a shamrock-free Bord Failte and a nationwide independent radio service, received a couple of hard knocks in the past few days. Oddly enough, the common flaw was one which one would normally expect from their traditionalist opponents - that is, a total failure to communicate to the general public and a dismal failure to understand what people want.
Radio Ireland's failure to report its very existence to the majority of the Irish people is simply astounding. I say this as someone who has been broadcasting on Radio Ireland over the past couple of weeks between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. each evening in place of Eamon Dunphy, who is on holiday, so I've been in the habit of looking for Radio Ireland promotional material. There is none. There is no way for anybody to find out what wavelength Radio Ireland broadcasts on (FM 100102, actually). There are no newspaper advertisements, no billboards, no car-stickers, nothing.
Unpublicised wavelength
If Radio Ireland is broadcasting unheard, then who can be surprised? It could be transmitting the programmes of the highest quality in the history of radio, but that is irrelevant: a radio station with its wavelength unpublicised can expect to be heard only by scan-tuning lunatics searching for signs of extra-terrestrial life. An unpromoted radio station is like the National Gallery with its lights off. No improvement of the "product" will improve the audience-rating, any more than installing Van Goghs and Turners will do anything to improve the popularity of an unlit National Gallery.
We live in an era of marketing, and an unmarketed product will be an an unsold one, no matter its quality. This is so obvious that you wonder how Radio Ireland could possibly have forgotten it.
What deepens the mystery is that those responsible for Radio Ireland, Moya Doherty and John McColgan, are not merely brilliant communicators themselves, but also, more than any two people in Ireland, have through Riverdance been responsible for the greatest single feat of reinventing the international image of Ireland in recent decades - far greater than anything achieved by Bord Failte.
How could such people have presided over the dismal and undeserved communications failure that is Radio Ireland? It is far better than its audience ratings deserve, but then so are the paintings in an unlit National Gallery. Yet we know that perseverance does work: Rupert Murdoch stayed loyal to Sky television through thick and thin for years, with an audience of just a single unconscious drunk and his dog, while a treasury vanished into the ether and the established broadcasters of Britain slapped their thighs and scoffed. Those broadcasters now beg for a fraction of Sky's sports action, and British - and of necessity Irish - television is changed forever.
Absurd conditions
The squandered money of Radio Ireland is gone for good, but an economy prospering as ours is can support another radio station, though not easily: the mirror-image conditions which require free-standing, unsubsidised independent broadcasters to replicate RTE's licence-subsidised news service are simply absurd - and a reminder of how the personally vainglorious and commercially irrelevant ambitions of politicians actually hinder economic growth.
Which is why we should all welcome the interference of Jim McDaid in the matter of the Bord Failte logo, in which he is probably in part right (though the old shamrock logo is merely an obsolete memento of our naive, self-centred past when we thought the world worshipped us and it). Its replacement logo is simply incomprehensible, and that is good. Anything which will limit the numbers of tourists coming to Ireland is to be welcomed. Maybe if Bord Failte's central will is damaged by busy-body intrusions, it will be less successful in luring visitors here. The fewer the better.
Quite literally. Clifden all day long is now like Picadilly Circus at 5.15 p.m. on a wet Friday before Christmas. At least those tourists (such as myself) causing the Clifden thrombosis were there to spend money. But Ireland is now attracting vast amounts of tourists who appear to subsist on a diet of worms and rainwater: oh, the look of anguish on the face of the proprietor of the excellent Mitchell's restaurant when he learnt that only two of eight foreign "customers" at one table intended eating anything.
So if Michael Mortell, the good and gifted Bord Failte Chairman, has to spend his time fighting off Ministerial intrusions into his domain, excellent. Maybe he will be not be able to do the job for which is paid - and I do not doubt could do unnervingly well - which is to attract foreigners here. In law, alas, we cannot filter incomers: so the best policy in an island sinking under their weight is not to lure them in the first place.
Simple solution The solution is simple. Bord Failte's international marketing should be handed over to the bright sparks responsible for the Radio Ireland marketing strategy. In two years' time, our foreign tourists will have vanished, and will have been replaced by Irish tourists - the best of the lot, as the tourist business will tell you. By which time, we all must hope, the guts and the perseverance of John McColgan and Moya Doherty, aided by a long-overdue marketing strategy, will have paid off and Radio Ireland will have to employ armed commissionaires to prevent RTE radio presenters looking for work. In the meantime, marketing is up to me: I say again: FM 100-102.