W hat, in the context of society, is "debate"? The question is brought to mind by a report in last Monday's Irish Times of a "debate" at the Cúirt literary festival in Galway about, interestingly, freedom of expression.
The Tubridy Show was almost tolerable on Friday (28 April). It featured the wonderful Derek Mooney plugging his Mooney Goes Wild programme of the following day and the arrival of blue tits in a nest in his back garden. Derek talked sensibly and interestingly about the blue tits, about jackdaws they had filmed last year, about plastic bags, money-back-bottles and lots else. No blather, no twittering (from him anyway). Substance. Then there was Diarmuid Ferriter, the historian, talking about his new book What If, based on his radio series of the same title. Again, substance.
Eamon Dunphy launched Newstalk's new premium rate text service on air on Tuesday 2 May by emphasising that it was cheaper to telephone or email the programme and telling listeners that "unfortunately" texts would now cost 30 cents.
The reporting on Iran has been skewed and an exhibition with art on the subject of Iraq has some interesting perspectives.
Ceefax Page 338 has a great morning service where each of the various lies invented to fill the ever-expanding football pages is set side by side and each paper credited with the various inventions. So it came to pass, on the Sunday morning after "Metatarsal 5: Rooney Redux" the following headlines appeared in order: "Stephen Gerrard says England can't win the World Cup without Rooney" (Express) and "Sven Goran Eriksson says England can win the World Cup without Rooney" (Times).
This weekend's Fine Gael ard-fheis at the Citywest in Dublin is a crucial one for the main Opposition party as it presents its outline approach to the next election, now only a year away, against a backdrop of mixed and fluctuating opinion poll ratings.
It is common to read opinion pieces by John Waters and Breda O'Brien in the Irish Times criticising the generalised media bias against the Catholic church. Given the absence of opinion writers who take an overt position against Catholicism, it is on the news pages that they discern this bias.
Ardal O'Hanlon's football series is leagues ahead of the week's other sporting offerings, while RTÉ 1 dramatises a nuclear disaster in Sellafield
In 1919, two years after his Declaration offering European Jews a "national home" in Palestine, British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour asserted that "Zionism... is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land..."
Pat Kenny could be a good radio broadcaster. He has the voice, the fluency, the intelligence and the familiarity with his medium. All he needs is discipline, whether self-imposed or externally-imposed. Someone in his earphone frequently screaming "shut the feck up" or, ideally, a variant of same.