PERHAPS THE nation's politics have become like the nation's housework: everyone knows it has to be done, but nobody wants to hear about it. This could be the explanation for the fall in listening figures for the major radio programmes broadcast in the country, which were published last week and showed a marked decline, writes
ANN MARIE HOURIHANE
Of course radio programmes are a lot more interesting than housework – after all, anything is more interesting than housework – or at least they used to be. Radio was the glamorous companion for the stay-at-home Cinderella. That endangered species, the housewife, was once thought to use the radio to distract her from the monotony of her domestic tasks, so that the fall in radio listeners may actually indicate not just a fall in the amount of housewives but a fall in the amount of housework being performed as well.
I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if housework faded altogether. How could we tell? There is never any public discussion of keeping the fridge stocked, the washing machine whirring, the clothes folded or the food poisoning to a minimum. The nation could have silently and unconsciously resolved to stop doing its housework, as a sort of dirty protest against an administration which couldn’t even manage the most rudimentary national housekeeping.
Despite a recent study from the London School of Economics which found that men who helped with the housework were less likely to suffer divorce – a finding which is in itself old news – housework is shrouded in a silence much deeper than the one which used to surround domestic sex, and even deeper than the one which still surrounds domestic income. It is the drudge which dare not speak its name.
Strangely enough, the only public figures who talk, even briefly, about domestic labour are fiction writers. Martin Amis has said that the biggest mistake feminists ever made was – and I paraphrase a lot less gracefully here – to allow their campaigns to stop on the wrong side of the front door. Amis was also honest enough to reassure his male interviewer that he, too, found the prospect of equality on the home front terrifying. The feminist author Fay Weldon, in contrast, has said that while one should fight for equality and justice in the workplace, on the home front the battle is just not worth it.
Housework is one of the few subjects on which our politicians have nothing to say. This must be because the male politicians do not want to investigate yet another system from which they benefit so shamelessly; meanwhile, the female politicians have only solved the housework problem by shelling out big bucks for cleaners and housekeepers whom they would rather not mention for fear of spoiling their image as an Ordinary Person.
Until recently, politics and most of the national news in general – which seems to consist entirely of reports from the Dáil, the banks and a few stockbrokers – stood in direct contrast to housework. It was the minimum of real work achieved with the maximum of public debate and fuss. Parliamentary politics has generated its own industry of analysis and speculation, to which some people are really addicted.
Who would have thought that catering, or not catering, to a population of four million people could create such a fuss? Newspapers, television and radio are all saturated with parliamentary politics to an extraordinary degree. On radio in particular, news which does not pertain to the Dáil and the latest reports from stockbroking firms seems to consist almost entirely of the reporting of murders, deaths in car accidents and sport.
This is not because news in Ireland is particularly interesting; it is simply that it is cheap. It is simple to gather the press releases and the newspapers, open a couple of phone lines and let the shouting begin. In these circumstances it is no wonder that even the radio presenters themselves, bright people, get bored. And it is no wonder either that, as the news from round the country has become more distressing and depressing, the general public has decided that it can live with less radio and fewer newspapers too of course, although newspapers have to be paid for. Radio is more immediate, more flexible and more personal than the other parts of the old media.
Presumably we are spending a lot more time at home since the country went bust. Radio could be our companion there, as we clean up after the dog and peel the potatoes. But my guess is that we are turning to television and to computers. We’re turning to the radio only at the weekend when Ruth Buchanan and Marian Finucane, to give only the more stellar examples, provide us with a handy compendium of the week’s radio programmes, with all the boring bits removed.
Meanwhile, we watch Gleeand a lot of wildlife programmes. Ireland may have come to a point where it is talked out.