Declan Lynch: There's just no getting away from Dumbo in the corner

September 30 2012 04:44 AM

IN the Henry Root letters, the author writes to the queen, noting that she always seems to be opening things, and wondering if, for a change, she might consider closing a few things -- the BBC, the Guardian, and so on.

In that spirit, Root would have given a broad welcome to the recent closure of RTE's London office, though perhaps understandably, this was not the reaction of RTE's departing London correspondent Brian O'Connell. His piece in the Irish Times last week, in which he described the closure as an endorsement of "Ryanair journalism" which betrayed RTE's public service obligations, was interesting in a number of ways.

For a start, it may be the only article ever written by a journalist resigning after 20 years in the job, which did not kick off with a few hilarious anecdotes -- O'Connell's reluctance to indulge in such vulgarities even in his swansong was almost admirable.

He wrote of "a lack of any nuanced approach to cost-cutting", which is no doubt true, and yet one felt that there were other nuances involved here, which did not quite come across in O'Connell's analysis. For example, the first reaction of many intelligent people to the closure of the London "bureau" would be to question why they are closing London when they could have just closed down the Washington bureau about 10 years ago and hardly anybody -- even Charlie Bird during that unhappy time when he was actually the US correspondent -- would have minded at all. And why are they still maintaining a Connemara bureau or whatever it is they call the place where they make An Nuacht and other such lamentable wastes of public space?

Whatever their limitations, no bureau in London or Washington or anywhere else should be closed as long as we're looking at "an eilifint ins an seomra" which recently appeared during an item on Morning Ireland about this country being one of only two in Europe in which the learning of a foreign language is not compulsory for schoolchildren.

In an interview with UCD professor Vera Regan, presenter Cathal MacCoille made the point that since English is usually the foreign language being taught in other countries, and since we already have English, perhaps the situation is not so bad. Which was fair enough. He also quoted a Department of Education line that the learning of Irish and English provides a "scaffolding" for the later learning of a foreign language -- erring on the side of generosity, he did not mention that it was also a "scaffolding" for bullshit.

But mainly he managed not to make the point that our children do indeed learn a language which for the vast majority involves a process similar to the one whereby children in other countries learn a foreign language. Therefore, to all intents and purposes, Irish is the foreign language that is taught in our schools. And whether you regard that as a good thing or a bad thing, for a man as meticulous as MacCoille not to mention it, is a most extraordinary thing.

You wonder has the devotion to "an eilifint ins an seomra" become so institutionalised out there, we may see the closure of the Cork bureau, the Galway bureau and the Belfast bureau and still there'll be someone reading An Nuacht every day with nobody looking at them?

So there is an ideological dimension to these cuts -- arguably the promotion of the Irish language is now the core ideology of RTE, the one thing that is unchallenged and undiminished.

Against this, your London bureau wouldn't stand a chance. But its usefulness could be challenged on other grounds, not least the fact that, as O'Connell writes, "for decades RTE has been a member of the Westminster lobby system, RTE and the Irish Times being the only two foreign news organisations to hold such membership".

This in itself should be grounds for abolition. The "lobby system" encourages one of the lowest forms of journalism, all the more damnable because it is regarded so highly by the hacketariat. Let us just say that any time that a correspondent spends on the inside track at Westminster, when he could be on the outside track talking to poor Paddy up in Kilburn and Cricklewood, is dead time.

In general, we should always be sceptical when large organisations devote so much of their resources to the issue, of, well, "resources", rather than to the issue of simply getting better at what they do. While some aspects of broadcasting and of journalism are indeed substantially about "resources", there are other considerations -- for example, there's an exceptionally good programme on Lyric FM called The Blue of the Night. It starts at 10'clock, just after Off the Ball has finished on Newstalk. Which means that every night in Ireland there are five straight hours of high-class radio, and though I am taking a wild guess here, I would say that the whole lot of it put together costs about 30 quid. Sometimes the problem is not that too much money is being spent, but that the wrong people are getting it.

For The Blue of the Night, there's the consolation that while its presenters are not getting, say, €575,000 a year, they may escape what Brian O'Connell regards as crude cuts. But still, a few "Irish" nights would do them no harm.