An Irishman's Diary

FIRST aired on Radio One last year and recently repeated, Brendan Balfe's series The Irish Voicesomehow passed me by both times. But I see now that its latest outing was in direct competition with the hour I spend every night telling my children to for God's sake GO TO BED: a disastrous piece of scheduling by RTÉ.

Happily, someone in Montrose sent me a new three-CD set of the highlights. Playing which, in an idle moment the other evening, I was instantly riveted. Compiled from 80 years of radio recordings, the series is a patchwork quilt of social, cultural, and political history, united only by the human voice.

And I’m tempted to call it a definitive “Ireland’s Greatest Hits” collection, except that would be unfair to deaf and mute people. In a country as addicted to talking as this one, the contribution of silence should not go unappreciated either. That said, under its own terms of reference, the collection is charmingly exhaustive.

It's the sort of thing you dip into for a moment and then can't quit. Scanning the contents, for example, I found myself most curious to know what The Wearing of the Greensounded like, as sung by jazz-singer Peggy Lee ("Irish voice" is loosely defined). Strangely moving, was the answer.

But then I also had to hear WB Yeats reading The Lake Isle of Innisfree; and the people of Bansha, Co Tipperary, welcoming the arrival of electric light; and Tommy Tiernan explaining the Irish relationship with the English; and Margaret Burke Sheridan singing Danny Boy,and George Bernard Shaw talking about being 90; and so on.

Instead of ordering the children to bed, I found myself telling them to wait a minute and listen to this one: while playing, for example, Des Cahill’s immortal description of Dawn Run’s charge up the Cheltenham hill in 1986: an occasion that threatened to burst the lungs of horse and commentator alike.

The collection has many such spine-tinglers and sometimes it's not the occasion (JFK in Ireland, or a Titanicsurvivor recalling the moment the band struck up Nearer my God to Thee) that does it, but the voice alone.

So it is with Dawn on the Irish Coastread by the late Ciarán MacMathúna. If you're a certain age, recordings of MacMathúna's voice can still render you temporarily helpless, making you 10 years old again, back in the family kitchen on a Sunday morning in the 1970s, being dressed for Mass, and listening to your mother telling you for the umpteenth time to for God's sake PUT YOUR SHOES ON NOW.

IT ALMOST goes without saying that several of Éamon de Valera’s broadcasts feature, including his famous post-war riposte to Churchill, which had the status of Holy Scripture among my parents’ generation. And of course the CDs also have his “happy maidens” speech, which I mentioned here recently in juxtaposition with Dev’s attempts – around the same time – to make Ireland a world leader in physics, via such guests of the nation as Erwin Schrödinger. The widespread suspicion that 1940s Ireland was stuck in some kind of time-warp may have been even truer that hitherto suspected. Because, Schrödinger aside, the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies that Dev established was particularly successful at attracting followers of Einstein. So much so, I’m told by reader Brendan Cardiff, that during the post-war years it was estimated that “12 per cent of all relativists” were studying in Dublin.

Of course, Einstein’s ideas have run into a bit of a problem recently in the Large Hadron Collider. Which is why I doubly regret missing a lecture at Trinity College last week by Ronan McNulty, a former Young Scientist winner who has worked at CERN.

Fortunately, the TCD School of Mathematics sent me an abstract of his speech (entitled Tests of the Standard Model in the Forward Region at the LHC). So here are the main points he was to cover: "Recent results from the LHCb experiment will be presented that test QCD and the electroweak theory. Using a sample of 37 pb-1, the inclusive cross-sections for W+, W- and Z boson production have been measured with typical precisions of 5 per cent. These results are compared to NNLO QCD predictions using the most recent parton distribution functions.

“Differential cross sections for the W and Z cross section ratios and the W charge asymmetry will also be presented. The W/Z ratio provides a stringent test of the Standard Model, while the W charge asymmetry has particular sensitivity to the PDFs.

“Further tests of QCD are provided through measurements of the exclusive production of J/psi and the Chi_c meson family. These probe the behaviour of the pomeron and can also be used to search for the odderon.”

Ah yes, the odderon. I feel like I was there now. As it happens, I knew the Chi_c meson family well. They were lovely people, if a little eccentric. One of them – Perry meson, I think it was – went off to America and became a lawyer. It was Eddie I knew best. Could be very strange at times – talk about odderons! Even so, a good man, if you could keep him away from drink.

Anyway, it's a pity I missed that talk. But I see the Irish Skeptics Society is hosting a similar event in Dublin's Davenport Hotel tonight and it sounds like it might even appeal to those ignoramuses among you who are not as well up in particle physics as some of us. It's a talk by Dr Cormac O'Raifeartaigh entitled Faster Than The Speed of Light: Was Einstein Wrong?Starting time is 8pm, there's a small (though not sub-atomic) admission charge, and more information is at irishskeptics.org.