RADIO REVIEW:FOR THOSE who say Morning Ireland(RTÉ Radio One, weekdays) is a gloomy way to start the day, Eleanor Burnhill's bank holiday montage of seagulls squawking and sunny snippets of conversation in Fingal, north Co Dublin, was delightful.
Radio can often paint more vibrant pictures than television. One English woman took a picture of her daughter. “Smile, Polly. The sun’s on you. Cheese!” Another lady told Burnhill, “Skerries is a beautiful place. We don’t like to leave it even for half a day.” “Did you catch anything?” one young fella hollered at his friend fishing by the water. Germans and Americans couldn’t believe the heat, while some Dubliners in the airport’s Departures area grumbled. “It’s a shame to be leaving today,” was one very Irish reaction to the sun.
However, this being “Mourning Ireland”, Áine Lawlor asked Paul Cunningham to remind listeners what weather the Met Office predicted for last summer. “Hot! Hot! Hot!” Cunningham recalled. Now that will give you all something to worry about.
Somebody with an enviable sunny disposition is the historian Simon Schama. Who wouldn’t want to introduce him to their mother? He is relaxed, animated, well-informed and seemingly without the monstrous or fragile ego that so often plagues the rest of us.
On Wednesday's McGurk On 4(4FM, weekdays), Tom McGurk spoke to Schama about his intriguingly entitled book, The American Future: A History. Naturally, McGurk asked what was next for Americans under US president Barack Obama. Schama didn't think it was a good idea to mix history and prophecy, which doesn't really jive with that book he's just written. Yet, even when he does sound a note of possible doom, Schama sounds chipper: "Obama hasn't made catastrophic mistakes . . . just yet."
Myles Dungan on Today(RTÉ Radio One, weekdays) called Schama one of television's biggest stars, creating a new genre on the box, making his convoluted histories of the British and American empires accessible.
“Obama is absolutely prepared to use hard American power, but only in the instances where it is necessary and moral,” Schama said. Um, didn’t his predecessor believe that too? But, he said, for Obama, “Faith is not simply a bit of window-dressing to get votes.”
Far, far away from those lofty ideals, the Ryan report on child abuse in Ireland brought into sharp perspective similar crimes in religious organisations overseas. It has even led to a call for a similar public inquiry in Canada. Reporter Dan Karpenshuk told World Report(RTÉ Radio One, Saturday), presented by Colma Fahy, that the Ryan report had a great impact on one survivor of child abuse in the notorious Christian Brothers-run Mount Cashel orphanage in Newfoundland.
The survivor, now 69, said the Ryan report read like a mirror image of his own suffering at Mount Cashel. Opened in 1875, the orphanage was steeped in infamy: “For 50 years there was rampant sexual abuse against boys as young as five,” said Karpenshuk. Only nine Brothers were ever convicted.
As the Canadians might yet learn something from the value of a public inquiry, so might we learn something from the infamous Mount Cashel: the Ontario court subsequently ordered the liquidation of the Brothers’ institutions to pay victims’ compensation.
On that same programme, journalist Phil Mercer said there are also renewed calls for a royal commission into historical child abuse in Australia, and Fiona Ford spoke to a South African man who was abused as a child in an orphanage run by Irish missionaries.
And, in another passionate essay, Kevin Cullen, a member of the investigative team at the Boston Globe newspaper that won a Pulitzer Prize for its work on the clerical abuse in the Boston diocese, said, “What happens in Ireland resonates in Boston.” Cullen told the story of an old Irish woman who, at the age of just 14, was dropped off at the gates of a Magdalene laundry by her widowed father. She now lives in Lowell, a town just north of Boston. After reading the Ryan report, the woman’s therapist called her up.
“Her therapist cried and asked for forgiveness,” Cullen said. “She admitted that she had thought she was exaggerating about the beatings, the degradation, the girl who lost an arm in a machine. That therapist found out what we all know – the truth hurts.”
qfottrell@irishtimes.com