On behalf of the housewives and househusbands of Ireland, I wish to lodge a formal complaint about the condescension we receive from radio programmers, particularly those on the national broadcaster. Through the week, those of us who are at home during the day have to endure either wall-to-wall pap or a combination of personality- and whinge-driven radio. The level of debate to which we are assumed to rise, it appears, is: "Oi tink Haughey shud be in jale, dyaknowworrImean?".
At the weekend, especially on Saturday mornings, the best wine is uncorked and suddenly the audience is assumed to be intelligent, balanced and sophisticated. Because the hunter-gatherers are at home resting their hairy backs, with their loincloths drying on the clothesline, it seems it is safe for RTE to assume a modest level of intelligence on the part of its listeners.
On RTE Radio 1, the Saturday morning schedule is now reminiscent of radio in its glory days, a fine blend and variety of programmes that stimulates, informs and entertains. One of the stalwarts of the Saturday schedule, Soundbyte, is being rested for the summer, but the hole is filled by one of the most interesting experiments in Irish radio for some time. Saturday starts restfully with The Week- end on One. In Ruth Buchanan's Playback, you get just enough of the week's whingeing to convince you that going to work has advantages other than the paypacket. From then on, it is as though RTE is assuming an entirely different kind of listener than during the week.
Daire O'Brien, Joe Jackson and Philip Boucher-Hayes offer a range of programming which, for the first time that I can recall in Irish radio, presents seriously and intelligently a view of culture, politics and life that might be associated vaguely with people between the ages of drinking-your-head-off and drawing-your-ension. The gem in the hunter-gatherer summer schedule is the drama series by Patrick McCabe, Emerald Germs of Ireland. The nine-part series will feature the activities of the serial-killer, Pat McNab, driven to rid himself of the attentions of various emblems of Irish cultural piety by hitting them over the head with a spade, cutting them up with a chainsaw, or burying them alive under loads of turf.
Last week, he disposed of his dear Irish Mammy and the Turfman from Ardee: "a germ just like the rest of them, rotten and green and rancid; can't leave people alone; callin' to their houses; interferin' germs of emerald green rottenness. All except Mammy: she wasn't a germ." But even Mammy was not immune to a clout of the spade: "once he got a taste of it, it became kind of easy". What makes Patrick McCabe such an exceptional writer is that he is both intimate with and removed from his material, which is essentially the human condition as lived in Ireland.
Other writers of his generation have a neurotic relationship with Ireland, in that they point to the places and people they write about as if to say, "Did you ever see anything as stupid?" Much of the Irish writing of the past 30 years could be described as the literary agenda of the Workers' Party, pronouncing judgment on a society which failed to measure up to adequate standards of modernity and civilised behaviour.
McCabe, though, has a relationship with Ireland comprising, in equal measure, hate and love. His characters are grotesquely uncivilised, his situations surreal beyond the point of absurdity, and the whole thing deeply disruptive of the official pieties which dominated our lives until recently; but to the extent to which his work is judgmental, these judgments are intrinsic to it, rather than the verdict it pronounces. There is no glib message or moral: both perpetrators and victims of the awfulness are equally trapped, and both are loved equally by the author. All his characters are crazed, fantastic, dark, irredeemable and funny - like Eamonn Kelly on drugs, as McCabe once memorably put it - but they are presented in a manner to suggest that in their lack of redeeming qualities resides their redemption. At some existential level, you sense that he actually enjoys the awfulness. The savagery, and his depiction of it, is as much annunciation of its life-sustaining properties as a denunciation of its awfulness.
After decades of moralising posturing as literature, there is something deeply cathartic about hearing these worlds exposed in such a truthful manner - with savagery, irony and relish, certainly, but without a sneer or a sniff. This is what stands McCabe alone among his own generation and perhaps among one or two on either side of him.
All of McCabe's stories have the structure and feel of a come-all-ye, sustaining a perfect pitch of menace and humour. And yet Emerald Germs of Ireland mercilessly satirises in the most profound way the pieties with which we have insulated ourselves, the values we have valourised and the sacred cows we have milked to death - the chauvinism of place, the unctuousness of language, the fascism of song: "Oh yes, we're all wearied out, turfman, but we still have our duty, we still have to learn our songs, all about your famous travels."
What emerges is a place, voice and form of character that exists somewhere in the heads of anyone between the ages of, well, drinking-your-head-off and drawing-the-pension. It is interesting that Emerald Germs of Ireland, though emanating from the drama department, occupies approximately the time slot once filled by Scrap Saturday. While tapping into the audience reared on Dermot Morgan, it employs that gateway to embark on a much more profound journey into the soul of the nation.
This is not only a redemptive strike for RTE's battered credibility in the satire department, but a return to form, under the direction of Ann Walsh, for a radio drama department which has been in the doldrums for many years. The cast - last week's included Niall Toibin, Pat Kinevane and Joan O'Hara - is superb. Music is by the incomparable Gavin Friday and Maurice Seezer. Today on Emerald Germs: Mrs Tubridy meets her fate in Whiskey on a Sunday. Expect it to be "10 times worse than `poor Ardee' ".