Sir, - On Italian television, every night around midnight, I see a woman commenting on some of the next day's English, French, German and Spanish newspapers. We see the headlines and hear her summary translations. It reminds me of my efforts over the years to get RTE to present a similar service once a week!
In the 1970s, I wrote to Mike Burns, who was a friend, and to Dick Hill when he became Head of RTE2. In the early 1990s, I wrote to Joe Mulholland. In each instance, I argued that, besides providing a service, a weekly Continental press review would be a concrete sign of Irish involvement in Europe. Lest they say they could find no one to do the job, I offered, for the start at least, to do it myself.
All three gentlemen found the idea fine, obvious, laudable. Burns pressed it on his superiors in News. Hill and Mulholland, who could decide, said they would look into it. But it never materialised.
Last year, when Joe Mulholland was moved from News, I wrote him a valedictory letter on the subject. Remarking that, though none of my approaches had met with any objection, the thing hadn't happened, I concluded: "Obviously, something quite deep and psychologically very interesting has been at work here: something like a corporate unconscious, with `English-insular' overtones, which finds the notion of a regular `foreign-European' intrusion into our Anglo-American airwaves overwhelmingly repugnant".
There is certainly something there to look at. But it is not insuperable. If the Italians are not afraid of seeing and hearing what the foreign-language European press is saying, why should the Tiger be? - Yours, etc., Desmond Fennell,
Anguillara,
Rome.