Even Minister John O'Donoghue found himself well able to express compassion for the plight of the refugees who died and those who survived in that ill-starred freight container. (The Minister also led the chorus of the ignorant and gullible who insist on presenting surreptitious migration as a matter of "trafficking", as if the migrants were inanimate commodities with no say in the matter, but that's another story.) Anyway, although the sympathy came even from the heights of an unsympathetic Government, on the airwaves it was not quite total.
Take Eoin, a caller to Monday's Ryanline (Gerry Ryan, 2FM, Monday to Friday). If that were him, he declaimed confidently, no way would he have got into a container on the say-so of some "dodgy mafia character". We imagined Tony Soprano trying to sweet-talk Eoin into the lorry - but no, not Eoin, he's too cute for that carry-on, he's heard what can happen if you do that sort of thing.
Eoin, essentially, offered us a new template for the concept "failure of sympathy".
In Turkey, they presumably have a somewhat more realistic take on the attractions of going west, the good odds that you'll get there with the right assistance and the opportunities that await.
I was reminded of a World Service documentary from September, in which an expert explained why the EU really ought to get real and lower the restrictions on immigration; after all, he explained, "you can't empty the dustbins of Munich in Istanbul". But don't be confusing Eoin with that sort of talk. Basically, he reckoned that what with the US "sorting out" Afghanistan, there won't be any more refugees coming from that country; ipso facto, what should happen next is that the US will go "sort out" Turkey, so people won't have to leave there, either. Refugee problem solved, thanks to Eoin and his good pal Dubya.
No one had the heart to tell Eoin that, as far as Dubya is concerned, Turkey is "sorted" already, with refugees as the inevitable "collateral damage"; maybe, when he's strong enough, a Kurdish survivor in Wexford might sit Eoin down and explain to Eoin about the US weapons that the Turkish government has been using to sort out Kurdistan for the last decade and more.
Eoin, bless him, wasn't overburdened with cop-on, but his blind faith in the good intentions of the US is roughly what you'd expect from a faithful Ryan listener of the last three months. It's not unique to Gerry; it's so widespread, indeed, that an intriguing statistical watershed was passed this week without any mention anywhere in our airspace as far as I could hear. As the World Trade Centre death-toll, planes included, dropped to about 3,000, a US academic went on the syndicated Democracy Now! radio programme in the US to present his tabulation of the civilian death-toll in Afghanistan from US bombing, based on conservative counts in specific reports from credible journalists: it was about 3,500, probably a low estimate. (See http://pubpages.unh.edu/%7Emwherold/afghanistan-new.xls) In other words, the number of innocent people slaughtered in the quest to avenge September 11th now can plausibly be said to exceed the number of those murdered in that day's attacks. And that's leaving aside both combatant deaths and the much higher numbers of people who are likely to die because of the long-standing restrictions on relief supplies - which the US still obstructs. It would be naive to imagine that it's simply the gullibility of the world's Eoins and Gerrys that permits the US to wage such a crude and cruel war in the name of virtue - but it does help.
States of course aren't moral actors, but supine populations and media assist in an ideological support role. (I heard a liberal US journalist this week described the "intervention" in Afghanistan as "nearly flawless"; for God's sake, defend the war as a messy necessity if you must, but don't just erase its 3,500 "flaws".) In the hands of a state under too little scrutiny, a "war on terrorism" inevitably becomes a licence to kill. Anyone doubting that axiom should have heard Ed Moloney and Eamonn McCann on The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday). In a long conversation triggered by the killing of William Stobie, these two superb and experienced journalists merely scratched the surface of the dirty little history of a dirty little war.
Of course, by the daisycutter and cluster-bomb standard being set across Afghanistan, Britain scarcely made war on Irish republicans at all. However, measured by the propaganda standard it set itself, as a freedom-loving democracy trying to deal honorably and honestly with a domestic terrorist threat to the community, Britain appears to have a deeply troubling record of colluding with and directing paramilitary violence. We heard far too little of it in the media while it was at its peak; thanks to the mysterious folks who murdered the potentially talkative Stobie, we'll hear less of it in the future than we might have done. Much credit is due to The Last Word, none the less, for this timely effort to map some of the connections for us. We can only hope it helped to nurture the enlightened sceptic in all of its listeners.
"It's like this: people who are poor don't matter." No, that wasn't someone commenting on how most Western media have somehow lost count of the Afghan dead. It was the principal of St Lawrence O'Toole senior boys school in Sheriff Street, Dublin, summarising his message in Ger Philpott's slow-burning Documentary on One, Lowest Common Denominator (RT╔ Radio 1, Wednesday).
It was "slow-burning" because for a while it had a dull 'n' worthy ring about it: a few moments of little boys reading out their lessons in class, long passages of the principal and another teacher talking about the students, the school and the community.
Their words were articulate but familiar, and so was the structure of a couple of (relatively) middle-class talking-heads commenting on poor and working-class children whose voices were only present to provide colour.
At times, the teacher's words were extraordinarily patronising: "You've got to take the child early, early on, when the child is born, even with the mother before the child is born, and have a sense of purpose and targeting, and say: 'Right, let's make this child's life a success'." The assumptions in a sentence like that, particularly about the benevolent though unidentified "you", are all the unlovelier for being unspoken.
But after a while, it became clear that these men didn't deserve to be carped at; they were speaking with great knowledge and affection about their pupils, and were actually sharply questioning of a great many of the ways that society and authority deals with a school like theirs. For example, much has been made of "mentoring" programmes, but one teacher reckoned they might be just reinforcing existing divisions: "Is there a clientele who are availing of this, who quite likely would have gone in that direction anyway?" They were devastating, too, about piecemeal and inappropriate initiatives coming out of the Department of Education.
The billing for this programme suggests it was meant to sound hopeful, but I didn't get that. I heard dedicated teachers in a school where only three of the eight teachers have B.Ed degrees, and they can't even get a fully qualified person to apply for vacancies, in a community where generations of social problems, injustice and neglect mean what happens in school is highly unlikely to make a difference to most boys' lives anyway.
For all its depressing and familiar qualities, Lowest Common Denominator somehow did put flesh on the children. After half an hour hearing about what they were up against, I found myself actually hushing the other boys in the classroom when one of them struggled through a reading passage. Yeah, I know that's stupid and they were only on the radio; all the same, this programme made future failures of sympathy just a little less likely.
hbrowne@irish-times.ie