Diary - January 1984: local elections, Tom O'Dea, RTE and the bus strike

VOTES: THE GOVERNMENT HAS announced that the local elecctions, due to be held on the same day as the European elections this year, are to be postponed. One of the reasons the government has given is that voters might find voting in two separate elections with separate voting systems confusing.
Most voters, however, will not be confused by this excuse. Most voters know that Fine Gael and Labour are afraid they will lose their majority on local councils and county councils if local elections are held now. Most voters know that Labour would be wiped out by the Workers' Party in Dublin in a local election. Most voters thus know that the government is postponing the practice of democracy until it suits them.

This has been done once already this year and it is to be deplored. President Hillery may mean well and may have taken over the presidency under very diffiicult circumstances, but his selection by the political parties, rather than the people, has not alone underrmined his office and his personal reputation, but has undermined the practice of democracy itself in this counntry. The Constitution says that the President shall be elected by the people. By consistently denying the people the right to elect the President, successive governnments are also undermining the Constitution itself.

The Labour Party will have a lot to answer for in the European elections. Firsttly, the decision not to hold the local elections can be blamed on them as they have had control of the Departtment of the Environment and they are the ones who seem most afraid to face the elecctorate. Secondly, they have played musical chairs with the European seats first 00n by John O'Connell and Michael 0 'Leary. There was even talk at one stage of Justin Keating getting one of them.

It is to be hoped that the electorate who are deemed not to be able to distinguish between two ballot papers will know what to do when the time comes.

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Two Fingers

THE LAST DAY OF 1983 saw the last television column twhich Tom O'Dea will write for the Irish Press. He began writing the column in the midd1960s and sources in the Irish Press claim that he would have continued writing it until kingdom come had the powers that be in the Trish Press not intervened and removed him from office.

The column was a mixture of O'Dea's opinions about various programmes and innformation about the political situation in RTE. He once wrote a whole column about how a huge number of senior executives in RTE attended a birthday party for a certain PR man's dog. This was a sign, he pointed out, that the glory had departed. He once referred to Anne Doyle's lips as being "very kissable". He also wrote a graphic descripption of Billie Whitelaw's lips and their performance in a Beckett play. Were it not for Tom O'Dea no one might have ever heard of Eoin Harris.

In his last column O'Dea decided to look back over the year and pick out the gems. He selected three programmes. The first seemed fair enough: an adaptation of a play by Ibsen called "Rosmersholm " done by Hugh Leonard. O'Dea tells us that Leonard commpleted the adaptation in nine days. It was, he said, "a uniquely inspired example of how a workaday adaptor can exhume the crumbling bones of a neglected and outmoded dramatist and clothe them with living flesh." Et cetera.

O'Dea then went on to praise a production of Arthur Miller's "Death Of A Salessman" which he also rates highly. Niall Toibin, seeminggly played Willie Loman whom

O'Dea described as "a Hamlet of the New England roads".

"The acting in both plays was superb, especially Niall Toibin's Willy Loman, even if it had too much of the Cork Loft Method in its madness," wrote O'Dea. "Toibins most formidable creation was the dry, harsh laugh that came no farther than the Adam's apple." Et cetera.

His third choice was a very curious one indeed. It was John McColgan'scommemoraative documentary on the life of Teilhard de Chardin with a subsequent discussion chairred by Derek Davis. O'Dea refers to de Chardin's daughhter. Teilhard de Chardin was a priest. He had no daughter.

Nor did John McColgan make a documentary about him. Nor did Derek Davis ever chair a discussion about him. O'Dea invented the whole thing.

You look back. Niall Toibin never acted in RTE's "Death Of A Salesman". No such proogramme was made. Ditto with Hugh Leonard's adaptation of an Ibsen play. O'Dea invented all the material for his last review just to show them.

Funny thing is no one in the Irish Press noticed.

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Grim

SOME CHRISTMAS LOST IN the mists of time RTE put on a good show on Christmas night. All over Ireland people sat laughing their heads off at the antics of Jimmy O'Dea. This was before a number of whizz-kids got secure jobs in RTE and decided that this sort of stuff wasn't what people wanted. People were more sophisticated. They had money; they didn't call the front room the parlour any more; they called it the lounge. And those who didn't call it the lounge aspired to calling it the lounge. And they had to be catered for too. The RTE whizz-kids held meetings to discuss all this.

People wanted a bit of everything but not too much of anything. Dancers, snazzy singers, tinsel, glitter, Ameriican songs sung with American accents. The RTE whizz-kids felt that people had a right, if not a duty, to forget their origins one night in the year.

This year we had the dreaded Mary O'Hara, who is daily growing to look more and more like her talented sister Joan O'Hara, one of the funniest women ever to strut and fret across the Abbey stage. The problem is that Mary takes herself seriously; Joan doesn't. If RTE is enncouraged by the TAM Ratings for this show, it is foolish. People only stayed watching it because there is a memory, or what is known as a folk memory, that in the distant days beyond recall, there used to be something good on RTE on Christmas night.

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Great Stuff

NEXT MAY WE ARE GOING to be inundated with the thirteen "great Irish writers" who have been chosen by a panel of judges. A huge proraozional campaign will be launched here and abroad to sell the work of these "great" writers. Outside Ireland the campaign will be called "Top Of The Irish".

The list of the chosen people is almoist as strange as the choice of judges. None of the judges has ever made any pronouncements about literature, great or otherwise, before. Their names are Rita Childers, best known for having been married to Erskine Childers, Henry Mountcharles, best known for letting the Rolling Stones play in his garden and Colm 0 Briain, formerly Director of the Arts Council and now general seccretary of the Labour Party. The last may have loads of opinions about literature, and may know a great writer when he sees one but his views have been kept from the public at large. His deliiberations at the Arts Council were always behind closed doors.

These three people connsider Mannix Flynn to be a great writer and Francis Stuar not to be one. They think Liam Lynch is a great writer but not Brian Friel. The fact that Mannix Flynn and Liam Lynch have written just one book each and Francis Stuart and Brian Friel a large and highly respected body of work is a matter of indifferrence to the judges. Your pubblisher had to enter you before you could be considered by Rita Childers, Henry Mounttcharles and Colm 0 Briain.

The reason why Mannix Flynn and Liam Lynch are on the list seems simple enough: they are published by Irish pu blishers. The other eleven are published by English pubblishers even though a few of their less popular works are published by Irish publishers.

This promotional campaign "Top Of The Irish", a title which has certain stage Irish connotations, will not do much good for Irish pubblishers, but a great deal of good for their English counnterparts.

The campaign will do much harm in other ways. The word "great" either means something or it doesn't. The only writer among this list who could be called "great" with any sort of accuracy is Samuel Beckett. The rest are good in their own way, are promising, are very interesting, are minor, are professional, entertaining. But not great.

Milton, for example, is a great writer, but you could hardly call William Trevor "great". Milton, however, is not Irish and anyway, wasn't entered by his publisher. It is a pity the judges saw fit to lend their names to deebasing words in this way.

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Kindness

THERE WAS A GREAT public outcry when the buses went on strike on St Stephen's Day. Everyone agreed that the CIE workers were a dissgraceful bunch, had never done a day's work in their lives, were overpaid, a burden on the commuter and not alone that a burden on the taxpayer. Bus conductors and bus drivers, pay into a pension scheme it may be of interest to know, from which on reetirement they benefit to the tune of £16.50 a week if they retire at 65. If they retire earlier they get less. III health is an abiding probblem in CIE particularly among bus drivers, many of whom suffer from high blood presssure. (Wouldn't you if you had to try and manoeuvre a bus through the centre of Dublin all day?) If they find themselves unable to drive a bus and they are under the age of 55, they get all the money they have paid in to the pension fund back, less ten per cent for adminisstrative work, and don't get any pension. For several years now the drivers and conducctors have been trying to have the pension scheme improved.

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Clarification

IN CASE THERE HAS BEEN any misunderstanding, June Levine has asked us to clarify that certain sections of the article "A Woman In Ganggland" (Magill, December 1983), while written by June Levine were based on Lyn Madden's forthcoming autoobiography.

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And Now For The Bad News

WE STATED IN THE APRIL 1983 issue of Magill that the cover price of the magazine would rise to 95p from the October 1983 issue onwards. We managed to hold the 85p price until now but we are forced by rising costs to inncrease the price now. We believe that the magazine will continue to prove more than good value for money, espeecially with the addition to our editorial staff of Olivia O'Leary. We take the opporrtunity to wish all our readers a happy 1984.