Amongst pupils, not such a colossus?

RADIO REVIEW:THE OLD CANARD that school provides the happiest days of our lives always had an ironic ring, but these days it seems like a particularly hollow joke. It is not just revelations about institutional child abuse that have dispelled such innocent remembrance: as Liveline(RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays) showed last week, the everyday culture of harsh discipline that prevailed in Irish schools up to the 1980s has left many people nursing wounds from their schooldays.

Such unhappy experiences are grist to the mill of Joe Duffy’s show, but Tuesday’s edition was notable for the way the grievances centred on one individual, the late John McGahern. The Leitrim-born writer, who died in 2006, has often been portrayed as an early dissenter from the pieties and inequities of the old Church-dominated Irish state, largely due to his dismissal from his teaching post after the banning of his 1965 novel,

The Dark.

But this reputation was disputed by a caller, Martin, who was taught by McGahern at Belgrove national school in Dublin in the 1950s and 1960s. According to Martin, who had read his former teacher’s books, McGahern was not the benign figure represented in the media. Rather, he was a volatile presence, capable of giving a “box” for seemingly no reason. Martin said the late writer – whose behaviour “ate away at your confidence” – was no worse than any other of his teachers, but nor was he any better.

Other past pupils called in to agree. Aidan said he had been “hypnotised” by the author’s unpredictable rages. Dennis, who seemed particularly resentful about his experiences, said McGahern was a “dangerous man”. It was not one-way traffic, with some phoning to say they had been inspired by their old teacher, while the McGahern scholar Eamon Maher lent some balance. In fact, most of those who claimed punishment at his hands were less unhappy with the man himself – he was just in the wrong profession, commented one – than the glowing portraits posthumously painted by writers such as Joseph O’Connor.

Duffy tried to keep the pot boiling, however, wondering whether McGahern’s behaviour was hypocrisy. Duffy referred to Martin McGuinness’s double standards in condemning Constable Ronan Kerr’s murder while refusing to denounce the IRA killing of Mary Travers in 1984, an issue highlighted on Monday’s show: the implied comparison was, to put it mildly, cack-handed.

Duffy also mused if a tendency by Irish authors to “big up” each other had contributed an inaccurate picture of McGahern. But by the end, when a woman who had a couple of sour encounters with McGahern at social functions was denouncing his lack of personality, an equally one-sided depiction of the author was on show, with no chance of redress on his part. Even allowing for the fact that McGahern has been eulogised in a manner at odds with his taciturn demeanour and ascetic outlook, it was depressing to hear the failings of someone so recently deceased dissected in such detail.

Teachers may no longer be allowed to dish out the corporal punishment that was the norm in McGahern's day – almost inevitably, Wednesday's Liveline was swamped with tales of cruelty in other schools down the years – but the classroom can still be a vicious environment. Now, however, the tormentors are more likely to be pupils preying on their classmates. This was the scenario presented by the writer Joe O'Byrne in Drama on One: Yardstick(RTÉ Radio 1, Sunday), his play about teen bullying in a digital age when text messages and Facebook pages cause as much anguish as physical intimidation.

There was a slightly self-conscious air to the drama, from its youthful topics to its offbeat dramatic device of using a mobile phone as the narrator. But the presence of the Oscar-nominated actress Saoirse Ronan was a real draw. Ronan played Laura, a 16-year-old teased at school about her acne and miserable at home thanks to her parents’ fraying marriage, who becomes so isolated that the only companion she trusts is her mobile phone, Moby (voiced by Amy Huberman).

As Laura is abused by her former friends – “Wear a burka, zitface,” reads one text – she tries to make the bullies sorry by using asymmetrical tactics, from wearing a veil in class to self-harm. The production, which O’Byrne also directed, was breathlessly presented, with bleeping sound effects and a thumping soundtrack, yet the rather conventional plot flagged over the course of an hour, while some of the characters were two-dimensional.

But the lead performance, by turns vulnerable, anguished and furious, anchored proceedings. Along with O’Byrne’s understated ending, Ronan’s turn prevented the play from becoming a didactic affair and turned it into something more believable and human. The villains may have changed, but, for many, happiness at school still seems a rare commodity.

radioreview@irishtimes.com

Radio moment of the week

On Monday's The John Murray Show(RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays) the host marked BBC Four's rescreening of vintage episodes of Top of the Popsby interviewing the veteran presenter Sir Jimmy Savile, whose vaudevillian spirit and thrifty instincts saved the programme from cosy nostalgia. Asked why he wore tracksuits, Savile answered that it was laziness: "I'm a single fellow and I have no lady giving me brain damage saying you're not going out like that." He repeatedly referred to the fact that he was not getting paid for his appearance.

But Savile was no fool, displaying a deep knowledge of the 1960s Irish showband scene and recalling the routes of the charity walks he did for the Central Remedial Clinic. Referring to the cigars that he still smokes, Savile remarked that “as a pensioner, we’re always looking for the odd one or two, hint hint”. After his entertaining turn, someone in Montrose should give that man a cigar.