You know the great old quote from Pastor Niemoller about 1930s Germany, "first they came for the communists" etc. It sprang to my mind for some reason when The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday) spent a couple of minutes telling us about the US Office of Homeland Security (ay carumba!) and its apparent threat to Radio Free ╔ireann.
Devoted memorisers of this column may recall occasional notes from 1990s New York when we got a sneer out of Radio Free ╔ireann, with its rebel songs in one speaker and crackling armalite in the other. Broadcast on public, listener-supported WBAI, the programme was largely an expression of the sort of fundamentalist Irish-American politics loved by New York cops and firefighters, ever-ready to highlight "sell-outs" in the ranks of Fianna Fβil and, later, Sinn FΘin. Its biases aside, however, it went in for plenty of hard, detailed information and expertise from this side of the water, and there are a fair few respected Irish politicians and journalists who have been interviewed on it. (Not me, nope.) And leaving aside the question of terrorism, it certainly helped raise a lot of money during "support drives" for what was one of the world's great radio stations, WBAI.
Listeners to The Last Word won't have learned any of that. From Eamon Dunphy's vague interview with Niall O'Dowd of the Irish Voice, we might have gathered from the programme that Radio Free ╔ireann is an actual station rather than a show; and that since it appears to support the Real IRA and habitually slags off Niall O'Dowd, it more or less deserves whatever it gets. What it's getting, apparently, is enemy status in the war on terrorism, with the withdrawal under pressure of the web server which keeps its archives (IRAradio.com, would you believe) - and, according to O'Dowd, further measures are likely. He muttered something about the First Amendment (the US constitutional promise, oft-broken, of free speech and free press) but it didn't sound like he was getting exercised about this seeming censorship.
Make no mistake: like or loathe Radio Free ╔ireann, its suppression is based on a standard that would have seen anti-apartheid and Central America campaigners in the 1980s branded as terrorists for supporting the ANC or FMLN. As the conversation moved on, O'Dowd trotted out the well-tried line that America can have no grey areas about "terrorism", no distinctions about "freedom fighters". Anyone using violence to achieve political aims, he said, is now right out of bounds.
What utter nonsense, Eamon Dunphy should have said, but didn't. Leaving aside, for the moment, the US's own high-megaton preparations, there's the small matter of the Afghan Northern Alliance, darlings of Western media and governments during the last fortnight. It's a group for whom, in reality, the words "drug-dealing terrorists" might have been coined; any objective journalist should have copied-and-pasted the DDT phrase from articles about Colombia straight into those about Afghanistan.
However, it doesn't serve the interests of power to use these words, so the Northern Alliance can go on being "guerrillas", or even graduate to become "freedom fighters", once the US starts using them as cannon fodder.
Either we believe in free speech or we don't. I am entitled to think Brian "Clow-en" Cowen is a dangerous ninny when he goes to the UN and comes on Five Seven Live (RT╔ Radio 1, Monday to Friday) to commend George Bush's "restraint" - a funny word for the deliberate, cold-blooded execution of a plan that promises international war of many years' duration, a plan likely to kill Afghans by the thousand before a missile has landed.
Similarly, I wish George Dempsey were a figment of my imagination (as he seems to believe the Vietnam War is a figment of my imagination) instead of a mainstay of Irish broadcasting and press alike. I wish Jack Straw on Today (BBC Radio 4, Monday to Friday) would stop saying "international law" as if the mere repetition of the words could make them mean the opposite of what international law actually states about the use and threat of violence. But, silly me, I would defend to the death - okay, to the discomfort - the right of Cowen and Dempsey and Straw and Radio Free ╔ireann to hold and to express publicly their bloodcurdling views. An entirely more benign set of Irish emigrant voices was featured on McAlpine's Fusiliers (BBC Radio 4, Monday to Friday). This series of 15-minute programmes on the 1950s generation of Ireland's economic refugees was hosted, strangely, by Ardal O'Hanlon, but it wasn't played for laughs. O'Hanlon, a nice Monaghan boy from a good Fianna Fβil family, let it be recalled, is seemingly patron of a London-based charity that looks after some of these now-elderly navvies. "I'll tell ya, like, in my 20s I often laid 90-ton of asphalt, hand-laid 90-ton of asphalt, on a Saturday mornin' before one o'clock, with a vile hangover . . ." Yep, men were men and Camden Town was full of them, queuing for work in the morning, drinking in the pubs in the evening and the clubs all night long. If the yarns sound familiar, you'd want to have heard O'Hanlon's pop-sociology: "These men had little choice in the type of work available to them, unlike today's generation of Irish emigrants, who are confident and educated and active in every walk of British life."
Okay, perhaps Radio 4 listeners need to hear such generalised guff from Ardal, partly to counter the effect of old Joe McGarry, who measured his 1960s wages in units of alcohol: a day's work was worth 64 pints, which certainly beats a hack's shift in The Irish Times circa 2001. Mind you, the buildings were no match for the tunnels, where in the 1960s workmen could earn up to a staggering £500 a week, but "safety didn't exist, and if you raised an issue of safety, you were sacked".
One might have hoped for a happier bit of history from You and the Night and the Wireless (RT╔ Radio 1, Tuesday), a new radio play from Hugh Leonard. The playwright's contribution to RT╔'s 75th birthday celebrations, this comic drama presents us with a provincial theatre company, 1925, threatened by the popularity of cinema, haunted by the possibilities of radio, censored by the pontification of the parish priest.
I say "comic drama", but in common with Leonard's other work, the comedy here ran aground on some strange and specific neurological obstacle that's apparently unique to my brain; I never so much as cracked a smile. However, there were elements of You and the Night and the Wireless that did reach other cerebral spots - in its easy-going way, this was an enlightening and occasionally touching picture of a unique moment in the history of culture and the State, as enacted in the politicking and commerce of one small town.
The historical clash of media and messages sometimes sounded overplayed; the foreshadowing about the soon-to-be-launched Radio (Unfree?) ╔ireann was a bit har-de-har-har; but if we can't trust Hugh Leonard with such material, who can we trust? His actor-hero's pompous but passionate desire for self-expression ran up against technology, market forces and the young State's war against foreign influence and sexual honesty. It was, I'd venture to suggest, a timely meditation on the limits of freedom.
hbrowne@irish-times.ie