Irish media personality, Ryan Tubridy set for BBC

It may not be up there with Glenn Beck somersaulting off Fox’s deep end, but Ireland has had its own media personality storm of late: our own Ryan Tubridy is moving to the BBC, albeit only for a few months. I don’t blame him.

The BBC is, after all, the best in the world at the very numerous things it does, and any broadcaster who wouldn’t want to work there has a serious salt deficiency.  It’s also very much a world station, so it’s not a case of joining the Beeb means he’s betraying his roots or something mad like that.

But I have to confess, it’s a perplexing move to me. Ryan, arguably the biggest presenter in Ireland, has taken on the role of National Flag Waving Morale Officer very much to heart of late, emphasising with metronomic consistency on both his radio and TV shows that the country needs good news, to accentuate the positive the country has to offer and realise what a great little country we are.

Therefore a move across the water, even if it is just for a couple of weeks, was quite surprising. That surprise, Choirmaster of Irish Happiness shtick aside, doesn’t stem from the fact that he’d want to work for the BBC, it stems from the fact that I had assumed his crossover moment had come and gone.

In 2002 when he took the reins of the 2FM breakfast show, Tubridy took Irish radio and gave it such a shaking that it didn’t know where it was anymore, which was just as well because the place it had been was terrible. He was smart, witty and exuberant, a self-styled young fogey and unabashed nerd. He was who he was, and he gained immense kudos and popularity for it. I loved him for that.

Better yet, it turned out he was a class act as a person too. Many’s a time I pestered him for interviews on my college radio station and many times he happily obliged. On one such occasion he called me up to apologise for the delay in getting back to me regarding a pre-recorded interview I’d asked him about doing, said he’d be happy to do it live instead and that he’d make time to be available for whenever it was we’d be going on air.

He did exactly that, acting as a freewheeling pundit on a college radio station that had as many volunteers as listeners, for a full hour. You could count on your thumbs the amount of people in a position like his so generous with his time.

It was around this time, as both the TV and radio strands of his career were in the ascendency but not yet at the peak, that I thought a crossover to the BBC was inevitable, doing the things he was doing in Ireland, and how he was doing them, but to a bigger audience. But he basically fulfilled his RTE Man Of Destiny prophecy instead, and conquered every square inch of Irish media real estate worth having. Between then and now, something has happened him.

Ryan, famously, is a fan of The West Wing, and in a lot of ways he suffers similar problems of late that used to plague President Jed Bartlet. He smoothes himself out. He lets the pitch go by. He runs straight to centre and would sacrifice controversy for keeping the show consistently on the road. He’s so concerned with being a responsible mainstream figure that he’s neglecting to do anything substantial with the responsibility. A perfect case in point recently was his interview with popstar Ronan Keating. Ryan went nowhere near the white elephant in the room, Keating’s affair with a dancer on his tour, and he was met with wall-to-wall derision for his soft soap. Celebrities are one thing, but a couple of months ago he was unforgivably lenient in an interview with former Minister and controversy magnet Willie O’Dea too, who he let prattle on about all sorts without taking him to task on his own preposterous escapades. Somebody needs to write “Let Tubridy Be Tubridy” on a sheet of paper and hand it to him.

I sincerely hope Ryan’s time at the BBC is really successful. More than that, I sincerely hope that it blasts him out of the funk he’s been in this last while and we start seeing  the Tubridy that so took us by storm in 2002.

It’s often said that a well-known person’s public and private persona are very different, and smiley people on camera can often be not so nice once it’s off. Tubridy couldn’t be further from such a description, and from what I know and what I’ve seen of off-camera Ryan he’s witty, irreverent and really good craic. I can only hope we see it more when the recording light goes on in future.

The Dalai Lama's visit to Ireland - the Irish see that what’s possible is anything we like

The fundamental problem with writing about an experience as profound as seeing and hearing the Dalai Lama speak is that the feeling it gives you is very hard to verbalise. Thankfully, the man himself has no such problem verbalising complicated concepts, and I came to realise that how he says what he says is as important as what he says. His is a wisdom that is more powerful stated than assumed, and it was wonderful to hear.

The reasons for the Dalai Lama being in Ireland and my being there to see him go back several months. The Possibilities Civic Forum was dreamed up a couple of months ago by three great Irish NGO’s: Children in Crossfire, Afri and SpunOut.ie, groups that do a host of inspiring work on social justice and well-being both at home and abroad. As a long-time member of the SpunOut family, there was no way I wasn’t attending. Their combined resolution to organise an event that could bring individuals and local groups together and energise them in their pursuit to change the way we do things in Ireland was, in every sense, a long time coming.

You could feel the 2,000 strong audience felt the same, as speaker after inspirational speaker was awarded rapturous standing ovations that came from their socks. Richard Moore, the founder of Children In Crossfire and the Dalai Lama’s hero, was a special highlight of the day. Blinded at the age of ten by a rubber bullet in his native Derry, Richard is a truly extraordinary example of forgiveness and compassion. Not only has he let blindness or bitterness consume him, but he’s dedicated his life to helping other children in conflict zones. He even sought out the soldier that shot him, and the two are now friends. It was hard not to well up listening to him speak.

Former President Mary Robinson’s reception was uproarious as she quoted, from a battered copy she carries round with her, article 29 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his or her personality is possible.” Mary emphasised the wording and the truth it outlaid, that getting involved in one’s community is a vital part of a person’s sense of themselves.

The day wasn’t just about big-ticket speakers though. Theatre groups, gospel choirs, poets, traditional musicians and advocates for everything from mental health provision to combating racism through sport showed us in no uncertain terms just how much potential the country has and what, as the title of the forum encouraged us to consider, is possible if we resolve to do it.

One of the things the Dalai Lama focused on in his address was “inner qualities”, the instinct within us that encourages us to be subject to one another, to embrace compassion and reject animus. As he left the audience in Dublin, he showed his own inner quality. Going down the wrong steps off the stage accidentally on purpose, much to the dismay of his handlers, he went over to the row of people in wheelchairs at the edge of the central section of the room, and administered to every one of them, before doing similar on the other side of the room. It was a simple act, but to witness it was truly special. If seeing it encourages everyone in that room to engage in similarly simple but meaningful gestures, then we’ll see that what’s possible is anything we like.

Belfast City's peaceful protest murder of Northern Irish police officer - the past is another country

Read more: Second arrest in murdered police officer case in North

Belfast’s City Hall has seen its fair share of demonstrations over the years, but this Wednesday’s peace rally commemorating Constable Ronan Kerr was the first I had ever attended. And it was quite extraordinary.

Walking out of the Scottish Provident building and taking the short few steps out to the middle of Donegal Square where the rally was taking place, I was struck by how many people were walking with me, from all corners, walking silently and with purpose. When I joined the bigger group of people, I was the furthest away from the podium on my side of the street. When I looked back a few moments later there were legions behind me, and when I looked back again after a few moments more, the whole street was wedged. There was something incredibly powerful in the implicit unity of people, of all ages, of all occupations, who had never met or even broke breath to each other.

The demonstration itself consisted of two very concise statements from the trade union organisers, two bagpipe laments, and silence. Palpable, powerful silence. In a big city in the midst of a big crowd at lunchtime, you couldn’t even hear a mobile phone go off or people whispering to each other. City Hall has seen its fair share of demonstrations in the past, but never quite like this.

The past, so the aphorism goes, is another country, they do things differently there. Northern Ireland today is a markedly different country to the one it was when I, or indeed Ronan Kerr, was born. This Wednesday was a case in point: the murder of a police officer wasn’t met with equivocation, qualification or justification, just concentrated condemnation of the mindset and actions that prompted a young man being killed so senselessly.

The past is another country, and nobody wants to revisit it.

Read more: Second arrest in murdered police officer case in North

The fine line between grift and graft – Irish politicians get ‘stuff done’ - VIDEO

The recent debacle surrounding Michael Lowry has made him a poster boy of sorts for basically everything that is wrong with Ireland. Even though the man is basically six-odd feet worth of shenanigans, the people of North Tipperary keep voting him in like it’s going out of style. In fact, his vote has gone up steadily throughout the myriad damaging revelations of the McCracken and now Moriarty tribunals. The reason? He “gets stuff done”, whatever the hell that means. Such is the skewed mentality of some Irish voters: sure if the local TD gets the potholes fixed or sorted out the local school with an extension, what odds if that they fiddled their taxes, accepted bribes or subjected errant constituents to water boarding?

This line of thinking isn’t unique to North Tipperary of course. A whole host of constituencies have, in the past or present, elected people who made parochialism not just a virtue but an electoral cash cow. Sometimes merely feigning activity does the trick. The singling out by both the media and everyone outside a thirty minute radius of Thurles of Lowry as a bad example of how to do business is one prong of a wider call for much-needed reform on a national scale, but even if Lowry is censured by the Dáil and dipped in a tar pit, the type of politics he represents won’t go away. And a lot of people wouldn’t let it either.

Counter-intuitive it may be, but Lowry has made a lot of hay over the whole notion of the “Dublin witch-hunt”, and the sense of anti-establishment that endows. Local politicians of every stripe often take to showing themselves off as renegades taking on the jumped big city boys who just don’t get the spirit of the people of insert-county-here, and it inevitably goes down well because people feel the need to elect the local man who’ll have very few degrees of separation between them. Thus, the reasoning goes that if all the other towns in the area have such a councillor, so should you.

That’s fine with the council, but the problem is these fiefdoms are extrapolated for national elections. Unfortunate as it is, people are more inclined to vote defensively for reasons of geography rather than positively for someone whose ideas they find more compelling. It’s a hard habit to break, but the general election this year did strike a blow for candidates who are keen to rise above the parochial scene, though to go too much the other extreme would be harder still.

In response to the exhausted state of gombeen politics, there is a new school of thought that TD’s should deal with national issues first and foremost. That in itself is great, but in a TV debate recently such an advocate found herself rather awkwardly on the wrong side of an argument. When asked if a constituent came to her asking for help getting a hospital place for an ill parent, Labour TD Ciara Conway replied with a clinical answer about providing information that sounded as if it was what she thought she should say rather than what she actually thought. The reason why the likes of Lowry prosper is that he probably would have tried to cordon off a ward if someone asked him to, and people are more inclined to respond to the right thing for the wrong reasons than the wrong thing for the right reasons. Especially if it’s a burning issue they have.

Should TD’s focus on big national questions rather than man-marking their own patch? Unquestionably, but nor should they be too high-handed or precious to help a constituent in need with a problem. The key is balance: helping the local school secure an extension or keeping the local hospital open is noble work, but when representatives start making solo runs for credit on ensemble projects or, as Lowry himself did recently, send letters back home with students of the school he helped extend for their parents to remind them who’s good to them, that’s when things start getting deplorable. Politicians who work hard for their locale and by extension their country are as welcome as they are needed, but glorified concierges are certainly not.

Sketch from RTE comedy show "The Savage Eye" which sums up this mentality -

Irelands Census 2011 and Catholicism - the demise of organized religion in Ireland

Read more: The Irish are fast losing their religion say experts

On Sunday, 10th April the people of Ireland will fill in their census forms under wildly different circumstances than when they last did so in 2006. But aside from the inevitable stark figures surrounding employment and the people who’ve had to leave the country to get it, there is another question that will also speak volumes: the question on religion.

Apart from the usual campaigns to get Jedi Knight or Pastafarianism officially on the books, or this year in particular augment the number of people who claim no religion, this year’s religion statistics will be a crucial chapter in an intriguing story.

In 1981, when priests were still more feared than the guards, the percentage of Roman Catholic people in Ireland was 93%. In 1991, a couple of years before my first communion, the figure was 91.6%. By 2002, around the time our school chaplain conducted our catechism-heavy Leaving Cert religion class, that was down to 88.4% and by 2006 it was down again to 86.8%. Now granted, the physical numbers of people self-identifying as Catholic has actually gone up along with the population, but that may be coming to an end.

First of all, in the same thirty year stretch that self-identifying Catholics went down by 6%, the amount of people claiming no religion quadrupled. Secondly, what the figures don’t account for is the amount of nominal Catholics, those who go to mass at Easter or Christmas and other such events but otherwise wouldn’t attend religiously. As it were. It’s those people that will likely signal a watershed moment in Irish life. For while the changes in Ireland’s economic structure have been noisy and tumultuous, a much more quiet social revolution has been building steam over the last few years, and it’ll come to a head soon.

Back in 2006, I wouldn’t have dreamt of putting down anything other than Roman Catholic on the census form. Now, there’s no way in Hades I’d tick that box. In 2006 I was happy to belong to the broad church, as it were, comfortable with the idea that mass was the way I demonstrated faith even if I personally disagreed with large swathes of Catholic doctrine, focusing more on the spirit rather than the letter of the law. Five years later, a combination of the deplorable revelations of the Murphy and Ryan reports and general exasperation at the Church’s increasingly insane intransigence eventually made me give up. I’m hardly the only one.

If as I suspect the number of people identifying as Catholics drops quite sharply in this census (or indeed the one after) that in itself will be significant, but more significant still will be the way that bears out in real life. A great many social events in Ireland still revolve around the Church, like baptisms, communions and confirmations. A lot of people who aren’t ardent mass-goers still attend these events, either through social convention, a residual sense of duty, keeping up appearances or just wanting a quiet life. More and more, they’re treated as pageants with an hour-long sit surrounded by stained glass attached anyway. Priests may disapprove of that, but so weak is their bargaining position nowadays, they can hardly turn down the business. But what happens when people eventually decide they won’t go through the pseudo-religious motions anymore, especially people of my generation who’ll likely be having the majority of their kids in the next decade or so? That answer to the question will depend on education.

The Church doesn’t just hold a lot of the cards in terms of social functions; it also controls the vast, vast majority of primary school administration. If you apply to be a teacher in a primary school a priest will be on the interviewing panel, and if you want to send your child to that school then communion and confirmation prep will form a large proportion of their second and sixth class, with a healthy dose of religion thrown in all the other years. If you’re not comfortable with that, your options aren’t exactly extensive.

In certain situations the Church seem willing to relinquish that control and if they do, like the census figures themselves, the attendance at religious rituals not really adhered to will slide gradually but noticeably, as indeed is proper. But if the Church doesn’t move quickly enough, or far enough, then a new generation of non-believers who have no allegiance to Catholicism, aren’t afraid to say as much and not inclined to pass it on will not be slow to question the absurdity of the status quo. The census on the 10th April is, in one form or another, likely to prompt a High Noon that’s been a long time coming. Thank God for that.

Read more: The Irish are fast losing their religion say experts

Ireland needs to grow up - Queen Elizabeth's visit to Ireland

At the risk of getting a pasting, here goes: I fully welcome the Queen’s visit to Ireland in May, or whenever it is she’s coming.

You’d think in an Ireland that has done a lot of growing up in years passed this would go without saying, and for the vast majority of people it probably won’t be an issue, but already I can hear the hysterical cavalry saddling up. Within days of the announcement, I began hearing all sorts of reasons why she shouldn’t come: the expense, the worry that her coming will cause trouble, or simply because she’s the Queen. None of these pass muster. 

First of all, why so hostile? When it boils down to it, the Queen is just another head of state, like Mary McAleese with a room full of jewels, visiting a neighbouring country, as heads of state are wont to do. And if the notion that the Queen is “just another head of state” horrifies you, why on earth would it? Even when the Anglo-Irish relationship was at its most fractious, the Queen’s role in the defining moments of The Troubles was negligible. It’s not as if she ordered the introduction of internment without trial, ordered people shot on Bloody Sunday or took a horrifyingly obstinate line against the hunger strikers personally. In that respect the Queen is a victim of her position: she can’t speak out against government policy no matter how much she might abhor it, as all hell would break loose otherwise. If you have a gripe with, as Gerry Adams referred to them as, “legacy issues”, then blame Margaret Thatcher, or Jim Callaghan, or Harold Wilson, or Ted Heath. Not the woman who spends her days visiting factories and youth centres and Commonwealth countries. 

Let’s consider that phrase Gerry Adams used in reference to the visit, actually. “Legacy issues”. I mean, where do you start with that one? Throughout the general election campaign I was critical of the way Micheal Martin insinuated Sinn Féin still had a whiff of dodginess about them, and how it was wholly disingenuous of him to encourage Sinn Féin into power-sharing and talking about a new future in the North while simultaneously intimating they weren’t fit for office and their old past in the South.  Now sadly it seems Gerry has used that same act on the Queen. Given the fact power-sharing was delayed in the North for so long by the likes of the Democratic Unionist Party because of the legacy issues they had with Sinn Féin, it was a bizarre choice of words. Nearly two years ago to the day Martin McGuinness called the dissidents who killed the soldiers at Massarene Barracks “traitors”. That was a huge leap from the dark days of “These shootings are inevitable given the actions of the British Government”, or words to that effect. Why a woman in her eighties still bothers them so much is beyond me. 

And then there’s the money issue. We can’t afford visits like this, apparently. An economic situation like ours will inevitably account for an increase in utilitarian deficit hawks, but the cost of such a trip would be miniscule compared to, say, the cost of buying and then storing voting machines. Then of course, the old Wilde maxim about the difference between price and value comes into play. Within the space of twelve months, we’ll have had the first British monarch to visit the Republic of Ireland, and an unvarnished mea culpa from the British Government on Bloody Sunday. The Saville Report, incidentally, cost £200 million, a figure scorned by those on the troglodyte wing of the DUP. You can’t put a price on banishing old ghosts. 

That the Queen coming would stir emotions is unsurprising, but it certainly isn’t logical. It is however a chance to show that Ireland doesn’t have to feel like a victim for the whole of its existence, that it can look at its past with acceptance and its future with hope, and that it can look its neighbour and former foe in the eye as equals. And even if the silent majority of Irish people don’t, as Ward Bond put it in The Quiet Man, “cheer like Protestants” during her visit, polite indifference would do much the same job. And if the loud minority could keep it down, the kind of people who shout “800 years ya c**t!” at an (Irish) DJ friend of mine with an English accent while he’s working, or who talk about the occupied six counties despite having never been further north than Athlone, that would be even better.

Election after maths - a default victory for Fine Gael's Enda Kenny?

In and around the 2007 mark, some of the higher lights of my existence were regular discussions I’d have with a friend of mine called Estella. Punctuated only by the occasional intake of tea and or scones in our favourite Galway haunt, we’d talk about all sorts of things but invariably, at some point or other, the conversation would swing to our mutual and often acidic dislike of Fianna Fáil. Neither of us could abide the fecklessness, the smugness, the successive waste of opportunity and money, and we were similarly astonished how they seemed to consistently get away with it all.

Estella is at Exeter University now, and in her absence I tried to keep her updated on the seismic events of Election Day we couldn’t have imagined years ago. It’s just a shame she, like a lot of my friends who’ve had to leave Ireland for one reason or another, wasn’t able to vote on this one. It certainly wasn’t for lack of interest.

But if voting was out of the question, revelling in the cataclysmic embarrassment of Minister after Minister would have to do for Estella and everyone else. Mary Coughlan’s vote more than halved  in Donegal South West and was eliminated on the fourth count. Mary Hanafin and Barry Andrews barely scraped 15% between them in Dun Laoghaire while serial poll-topper Willie O’Dea’s vote share dropped by nearly two thirds, an occurrence more embarrassing than having his insane eyebrows shaved off.

The real 'piece de resistance' of this election, the political nerd’s answer to the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, was the downfall of Dick Roche and John O’Donoghue. While they’d have been turfed out on their asses decades ago in most other countries, The Bull and The Roche hung on until last weekend, when their gout-ridden fingers finally gave up the ghost. Dick Roche, who became a terrifyingly present fixture on British TV during the darker moments of the IMF intervention, could only drum up 5%, while O’Donoghue’s vote collapsing by 10% provided him with the opportunity to make a statement that would make even the most sure-stomached among us vomit in outrage: “I hope that the irony will not be lost upon you, that I stand here on my evening of defeat, in a hall, this magnificent sports complex, which I helped to build”. May his kind never be elected again.

Specific cases aside, the big picture of this election is startling. Fianna Fáil have gone from never not having a TD in every constituency to having no party representation in 25 of the 43 constitutuencies.

In Dublin, they have 1 TD out of 47. It’s unbelievable to the point of anomaly. As such if Fianna Fáil’s performance was borne out of mistake after mistake, Fine Gael’s rise to 76 seats was borne out of avoiding too many of them. Enda Kenny didn’t so much win this election as defeat the others on away goals, and at some invisible point during the campaign people decided that a Fine Gael – dominated government was what they wanted and they’d tolerate Kenny to have it.

That sense of default victory combined with the constrictive state of the public purse means that in this, the most transformative election in living memory, the public mood has stayed basically the same. It’s unlikely Enda Kenny can summon us out of our torpor. And with Labour looking all but certain to become junior partners in government, that would leave Fianna Fáil, battered and bewildered though they are, as the single biggest party in opposition. The numbers may be skewed dramatically, but the reality is political reality is the same as it ever was, and from that position Fianna Fáil can rebuild just in time for the centenary of the Easter Rising. After the 2007 election, Estella and I would regularly ask each other “How did Fianna Fáil stay in?” The chances of us in 2017 asking each other “How did Fianna Fáil get back in?” look all too likely

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