Television: Putting them in their place

Luckily for Dermot Bolger, the Ryder Cup is like a bout of measles: you get it once and it never comes back

In the week when the Celtic Tiger almost died from an orgy of self-congratulation at the K Club, a ghost of the past surfaced on the The Late, Late Show when Pat Kenny interviewed Robert Ballagh about the retrospective of his work at the RHA gallery. Ballagh recalled an Ireland 25 years ago when police could enter a Galway gallery and illegally remove a poster of his self-portrait, 'Male Nude Descending a Staircase'. It reminded me of a forgotten incident from the same time when I was involved with a small magazine, The Grapevine, that reproduced Ballagh's flasher kite on its cover. The police visited not only us, but every shop stocking the magazine with warnings to remove it from their shelves.

But it wasn't this story on The Late, Late Show that sparked thoughts of how Ireland has changed, but a picture from Ballagh's 1980 book of Dublin photographs. The building in the photo looked like a sleepy outpost in the Mexican desert – a shabby, yellow-fronted betting shop, standing alone against a backdrop of utter desolation. Golf enthusiasts travelling from Dublin to the K Club last week passed the same spot. It is now called The Red Cow Roundabout.

For non-golfers, the consoling thing about the Ryder Cup is that, like youth and the measles, you only get it once and it never comes back. The bloated circus surrounding it is easy to mock and any international sporting organisation which views the presence of a diabetic child with an insulin pump as a security risk is paranoidly warped at its core.

Yet there was a sportsmanship among the players that is utterly lacking among the thugs who regularly cheat their way through Match of the Day. When praised once for calling a shot against himself, the golfer Bob Jones replied that he might as well be praised for not robbing a bank. And the gesture of Paul McGinley in picking up his opponent's ball on the 18th green so that they could share the point was a genuine sporting gesture that stood out in a cynical world.

RTÉ did well in its coverage on Ryder Cup Highlights, but the truly bizarre thing about the Ryder Cup in is that this is the only time when, for all the claptrap, many Europeans actually feel european in a unified sense, even if the bond of identity primarily springs from the fact of the opponents being American. Despite this, the overwhelming majority of Europeans cannot watch it live on television. With millions spent by the European parliament on creating a European identity, the fact that the only sporting contest in which Europe competes as an entity is only shown live on Sky Television is a true mystery. But perhaps terrestrial television is as great a menace to those who run world golf as people with insulin pumps.

Robert Ballagh may have suffered police interference with his work 25 years ago, but at least he never suffered death threats for attaching an amp to his guitar like Bob Dylan 20 years before. Folk Britannia has been excellent in recording the rise of folk-rock from the days when Dylan and Paul Simon played small English folk clubs populated by earnest middle-class boys. It was nice to see Andy Irvine get exposure along with figures like Davy Graham and Shirley Collins whose seminal album, Folk Roots, New Routes, barely registered a blip commercially but opened the doors to a new wave of innovation, despite the efforts of Ewan McColl's Critics Group to rein in such freedom and fix a standard way that folk songs had to be sung. However as several American golfers discovered this week, once a ball is in flight and destined to make a splash, nothing can turn it back.