Small-world service

Public-service broadcasting on the radio is a funny creature

Public-service broadcasting on the radio is a funny creature. It stands in particularly strange relation to "subsidy": the State, or An Post, or whoever, doesn't collect any fee from us for owning or listening to a radio. Yet RTE Radio benefits from the licence fee charged to television viewers.

So TV viewers, in effect, subsidise radio, commercial and esoteric alike - everything on RTE from Gerry Ryan to Oscar Wilde (have I mentioned the resemblance before?).

Nobody, not the State, not An Post, hands RTE Radio a particular sum of money, some nominated portion of its overall money, and says: "Here, do something worthy and not necessarily commercially viable with that."

The funny thing is: someone does something rather like that for the independent radio stations in the State. Through its New Adventures in Broadcasting scheme, the Independent Radio and Television Commission (IRTC) occasionally hands out (pretty paltry) piles of cash so broadcasters can pursue certain otherwise unlikely programming options.

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Thus is it that Today FM, best-known for one terrific evening drive-time show, a half-decent Sunday chat show or two and a helluva lot of crappy music and goofing off, suddenly pops up with a series of IRTC-subsidised documentaries, The New Irish (Today FM, Sunday). (Insert disclosure here: I've voluntarily served on the small IRTC-organised committee that decided to fund The New Irish and a great many other promising-looking projects from other stations.)

It's hard to know if that title, for a series looking predictably at the changing face of this island's population, is meant to be contentious, welcomingly assimilating or merely glib.

Personally, I think we should be more careful about ascribing "Irish", an ethnic moniker, to people who happen to settle or seek refuge here - or even to seek citizenship of the State.

But sloppiness, and worse, seems to be endemic to these questions: in the good old USA, attempts have often been made to rapidly "Americanise" immigrants - but meanwhile, third- and fourth-generation Yanks are often quick to identify themselves as (and ascribe their quirks of character to being) "Irish" or "Italian" or whatever.

This week on The New Irish, to the ubiquitous strains of Buena Vista Social Club, we were introduced to "Tony Oscar" - a tidy stage-name but no match for the dozen or so syllables of the real thing. Oscar is a Cuban who arrived here six years ago and plays salsa tunes to the Irish masses: "tonight it's Castlebar," the narrator told us, "and a gig with his band, Latin Soul".

The folks in the canteen at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology seemed to groove to the music, but this conventional, business-like documentary seemed never to find its own soaring rhythm.

Tony Oscar's story of political oppression and professional frustration (as an airline navigator) in his native Cuba won't rank as the most horrifying such tale you're likely to hear, but The New Irish appropriately gave him space to tell it. Then it joined his salsa-dance students in Dublin to indulge playfully a few stereotypes about the stiff-hipped (Old?) Irish trying to learn from Tony's fluid movements.

Oscar's story was an appropriate start to the series, because, as we heard, Cubans in the 1990s were the first nationality to arrive by the hundreds as asylum-seekers. And he has been painfully well placed to watch the growth of racism in Ireland.

But much the most admirable thing about The New Irish was that it was, quite insistently, not about an "issue", but about a person - the many facets of the life he has here and of the one he left behind.

Tony Oscar says he considers Ireland to be "home", but the men at the centre of Long Distance/Short Let (BBC Radio Ulster, Saturday) have rarely been able to sum up their lives with that neat four-letter word. Aislinn Duffield's documentary, ostensibly about homelessness, has the conviction to also be about character, about trauma, about loss, about running - about rootlessness.

Duffield doesn't necessarily have all the craft to pull this off, clunking her way through some of the transitions between interviews: "Stan also had an unhappy childhood . . ." Nonetheless, there was good stuff here.

Casual fans of harmonica player Don Baker and his music would know that he is something of a tortured soul - let's just say we won't expect to find him giving salsa lessons.

Nonetheless, it was surprising to hear Baker turn up as part of this programme, talking not only about the terrible violence and aloneness of his childhood and youth, but also the persistent sense of inadequacy that has plagued him through his musical and acting careers.

Cue singing, in a bluesy low growl: "I have run away from freedom . . ." "You have to know who you are to run away from yourself," says writer Stan Pattison, on the road, on the run, often sleeping rough, for some four decades - and finally getting a bit of a read on himself. Pattison reckoned he was "addicted" to being on the go, and this, as far as he was concerned, was no mere metaphor: he enlisted the help of a "community addiction unit" to help him settle down at long last. Now he's done it, in Derry.

Derry didn't feel like a happy home to Sean Morrin. As a young man, in spite of an OK family life, he fled to London because of his homosexuality - "if I get away, everything will be OK".

It's a familiar Old-Irish story, and what happened next is all-too familiar as well: "I never felt like it was home. I never felt that I belonged there. I never felt secure there - I wanted to run again.

"I had discovered alcohol and drugs by this stage. They were my escape from me."

Morrin's story took an unusual turn: homelessness back home in Derry: "If someone had asked me would I have been on the streets in London I would have said: "You know, there's a possibility - of course, London, you never know what's gonna happen. But to be on the streets in Derry - I would have said `never'."

In these amazingly honest migratory tales, we were reminded of the irreducibly private dimensions to the most public of issues. And that was some service.