Courage and cowardice
We should be mindful, I suppose, that Ireland is now populated by countless people who, by virtue of their national origins or age, would have responded to April's major media talking point with a quizzical “Nuala Who?” – or indeed “Marian Who?”
Still and all, for the rest of us the extraordinary O'Faolain interview on Finucane's programme, when she discussed her terminal cancer, and the equally extraordinary reaction it set off across TV and radio, was a reminder that for better or worse the nearest thing to a national conversation is conversed on RTE stations, predominantly Radio 1.
The originating conversation took place between two old friends who also feel very much like old friends for hundreds of thousands of Ireland's media consumers. Marian Finucane and Nuala O'Faolain, whatever their faults, have come across as utterly honest, refreshingly reflective and, at least in Nuala's case, almost frighteningly transparent.
These qualities were on display last year when O'Faolain was the subject of an intimate RTE TV Flesh and Blood documentary, from which she emerged, well... scathed. (Here I should nervously disclose that my family and I are the subjects of a programme in the same series due to air in May. I have not yet seen the programme and don't think either its existence or the sometimes tough experience of its creation have affected the content of this column, no more than my long-ago experience of editing Nuala's copy, or her kindness slightly less long ago in doing a cover blurb for a book of my mother's – but I should mention this stuff, and now I have.)
The conversations that followed the Finucane interview, on- and off-air, were less about the C-word than the D-word, which was a useful advance – because while you can hide in technicalities about cancer, death is a more stark, bare-faced horror. Nell McCafferty, typically, advanced it still further on Morning Ireland by talking frankly and sympathetically about the E-word, euthanasia. This may not be “the last taboo”, as Aine Lawlor called it – surely one of the worst and most avoidable of clichés. Nonetheless, in circumstances that must have been terribly traumatic for her, McCafferty was brilliant and brave to push at the door that her former partner had left slightly ajar.
Liveline, easily the best daytime programme on RTE radio over the last year or two, was less successful in its follow-up. Yes, it featured the excellent Teri Garvey “coming out” with her terminal illness – she was already in “injury time” well beyond her doctor's prognosis for survival. But Liveline thrives either on battles – the best of them waged against institutions on its listeners' behalf – or on opinions. Only the latter applied here, and Joe Duffy was forced into blustering defence of O'Faolain's right to be faithless and despairing, against a mild outburst of intolerance from kitchen-table philosophers.
What emerged finally was a sense that modern medicine helps us avoid death a bit longer, but at the cost of making it more opaque and awful than it has ever been. Hospices have a part to play – and Finucane's championing of them seems more poignant than ever – but euthanasia and, frankly, suicide for the terminally ill, already of course effectively happening all over Ireland as elsewhere, need to be discussed more openly.
Courage of a different sort, and an impressive, didn't-have-to-do-it investment by the national broadcaster, has characterised RTE foreign-affairs editor Margaret Ward's stint in China, for radio and TV. Travelling around that country is no easy matter, nor is reporting from areas where you are not strictly meant to be, but Ward has shown admirable pluck and produced unsensational items of clarity and purpose. Her gig in previous years had been a rather thankless one – mostly working in Dublin, adding her voice to TV images that RTE has grabbed from elsewhere. Now she grabs a German cameraman and heads for Sichuan, and a chance to do some real reporting.
Fergal Keane is rather more lightweight, but he has got around to reporting a lot of big stories, and creditably was prepared to defend his record in Iraq, and that of RTE, in a spirited April public debate on “Reporting War”. (I also took part.) In that debate, shown on RTE.ie, he recalled a moment of real journalistic balls, when he and his Montrose colleagues decided that Colin Powell's now-notorious presentation to the UN on Iraq's alleged WMD should be challenged forthrightly.
“We had some discussion about it. A few of us who knew a bit about the situation said, ‘He's telling lies'. So… we decided I would say ‘he's telling lies'. We said he was telling lies on the day. What more could we do on that particular day? Our problem is we're a relatively small country, we're not going to have any influence on Colin Powell.”
Like everyone else in the room and watching online, I took that anecdote to mean that Keane and Co went on RTE on 5 February 2003 and said of Powell, “He's telling lies.” I immediately trawled the RTE onine archives in search of this proud moment for Ireland.
Imagine my disappointment when there was no sign of it, or Keane: not on the TV news at 6 or 9pm, not on 5-7 Live where Keane had been doing most of his reporting – nowhere. After the presentation of clips of Powell were played, and Carole Coleman was everywhere, reporting Powell's claims without contradiction and declaring some of them “compelling” – a word also used by a US-based journalist who was brought on radio, shortly before an Iraqi exile who compared Saddam to Hitler. After 10pm Vincent Browne disserted Powell's evidence and declared it fatally thin, but evidence of RTE's alleged editorial decision to call the US secretary of state a liar was simply nowhere to be found.