Malachi O'Doherty

This is the text of a talk I was invited by the BBC Trust to give to a seminar on arts programming by the BBC. The seminar was held on June 24 at Broadcasting House, Belfast.

We have a range of arts programmes but they divide into two kinds, one which addresses an audience with a strong interest in the arts and another which melds arts into a more magazine type programming.

Examples of the first kind are much of the BBC Four output, Radio Four’s Front Row, Newsnight Review.

Examples of the second kind are The Culture Show, our news programmes, when arts events feature in them, and our own Arts Extra.

The first is programming which is concerned with evaluating the arts; the second is really a form of magazine journalism about the world in which artists move.

There was a time when, had I sought to locate a demarcator between what network programmes do with the arts and what we do regionally, I would have said that networks do the metropolitan and the events of bigger significance from the regions, including our own. We do the local.

Now that demarcator does not apply. The network does everything it likes, within the limited time available and so does the region, or at least this region. There is no programming on the BBC which concerns itself with Irish Art, Irish publishing, Irish anything. You get that on RTE.

Well, perhaps it is provincial and blinkered to concentrate on something we might regard as local culture.

I don’t think so.

I think local broadcasters should be in an integral relationship with local artists and that regional programming should favour local relevance over work that will be reviewed or discussed on Network – not to the exclusion of it, of course, but why should we pretend to offer what Mark Lawson can do better? When Mark Lawson needs to assess Sinead Morrissey or Micky Doherty, he’ll call us.

I imagine that in Scotland and Wales, people think much the same as I do on this.

Where the local is treated as having value in local programming is in stories about the local boy or girl doing well, and it is the doing well that makes the story, not the nature or character of the work they have done.

In short, we are separating life from art and saying that it is life we are more interested in and that art, being something else, a specialism, is a minority interest, held dear by those incomprehensible few who have read Ulysses.

When actor Jim Norton wins a Tony award, the first question he is asked on Arts Extra is, how did you feel? When Leontia Flynn gets the Rooney award she is invited to agree with the proposition: your mother must be proud. We are always asking of ourselves, how much of this story would be intelligible to Uncle Joe, and we are probably always getting that wrong anyway.

Go to the arts festivals and listen to the questions that come from the audience. Often they are those simple human questions — where do your ideas come from? How do you find the time to write?

And they are the people who should be our audience, aren’t they?

They are the demographic we have always had with us.

Look around at those audiences, at the summer schools and arts festivals, the John Hewitt, Aspects, and who do you see? You see people who are mostly over 50 and mostly women. Radio Ulster doesn’t trust that audience but wants a different audience. It wants younger people.

And, in ignorance of the energy and concerns of this generation ,we get a review of Coldplay in Brixton but not of Leonard Cohen playing in Dublin.

And the tension between catering for the audience we have and grasping for an audience we want, creates a strain that shows.

We get young reviewers speaking glib slang: check it out, check it out.

Women of 50 do not ‘check it out’.

On RTE there is a round table arts review programme every Tuesday night, like nothing we have on radio or television.

RTE has run several night time documentary series, including, in the last year, deeply personal profiles of Nuala ni Dhomnail, Paul Durcan and John Banville.

The result was films about the most disturbing experiences and deepest feelings of some of our greatest writers. That is, they met the criterion of great film making in any field.

Compare these with the BBC’s effort to make a documentary about Michael Longley, guided by the principle that no one would know him unless he was authenticated as a sensitive soul by somebody more famous for fine feeling, Feargal Keane. Here we learnt little about Longley, he even came across as tight lipped and obscure.

Taking him on his own terms, as RTE had taken the others, might have been as productive.

The decision that arts programming would not enter an elitist field is defended with the argument that arts coverage pervades our other programming. Not only do we make arts popular, we talk more about the arts in our other popular programming. See what a big story the rebuilding of the Lyric is.

Your new book might not get reviewed on Arts Extra — but it might be discussed on Talkback or Sunday Sequence. This argument sinks because nowhere will the book be seriously evaluated. Sunday Sequence will discuss issues arising from your book, not where you might go next as a developing writer.

On Radio Ulster we have six hours of dedicated book programming – every year. Did anyone seriously think I was going to say every week? No, that would be Radio Five Live you’re thinking about, the station that we nicknamed Radio Bloke. Radio Five Live has shared a discovery with Richard and Judy that audiences talk intelligently about the books they read.

Much of the BBC does not accept that principle and thinks you’d prefer to hear them talk glibly.

I argue that if the station is to be parsimonious with books discussion it must privilege Irish publishing. We can be cosmopolitan when we have the time.

When other broadcasters have upgraded their coverage of books, more books have sold. If it can be shown that Irish publishing is on the floor because of the reduced evaluation of books on Radio Ulster – how would we feel about that?

I think the death of reading would be a bad thing, don’t you?

If we are to have a renewed relationship with our audiences and with the arts world, we can do it by structural changes, improving the programmes we have, but we actually need to consider the underlying ethos governing arts programming across the BBC and particularly here. This ethos was seen, at its inception, as a move away from elitism and therefore a good thing.

The consequence is that we have lost the ability on much programming to distinguish between talking about art and about the people in the arts world. They are famous because they are artists, but we are not interested in the art; we are only interested in the fame.

We need to change three things.

The devaluation of the local. The local is our expertise and our ticket to the wider discussions.

The devaluation of the audience: We have to stop signalling to our most loyal audience that we would really prefer they were young people and a bit more cool.

The devaluation of the arts: knowledge and understanding of motor racing and gardening are still appreciated in the BBC. Why so much less, then, the arts of the artists?

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My three published books – more to come!,

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Mountain rescue, originally uploaded by malachiodoherty.

Mountain rescue for the pilgrims on Croagh Patrick – so why aren’t the pilgrims wearing helmets?

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A body set up to review the working of the parades commission which adjudicates on contentious parades in Northern Ireland is about to recommend abolishing that commission. Former Lib Dem leader, Paddy Ashdown, leading that body, may be crediting us with more democratic potential than we really have.

At first it seems a completely crackpot idea to do away with the parades commission.

Remember the long anguish with which it was created.  And the enormous problems it was created to solve.

Fr Oliver Crilly and the Rev John Dunlop called witnesses and deliberated and produced an enormous report.

The key problem was that deadlock over parades was generating enormous violence and threatening to destroy the entire peace process.

One important principle was that both sides to a dispute should talk to each other.  The Orange order didn’t like that, because it didn’t trust that the protesters were bona fide representatives of communities – and it wasn’t happy anyway with the idea that any community could object to them walking the Queen’s highway.

Equally important was the principle that the decision on banning the parade should be taken out of the hands of the police so that the issue would not be decided on the greater threat of violence. If the decision was the chief constable’s all you had to do, to get a parade banned, was to guarantee that he would have a greater headache if he let it go ahead.

Solution: an independent parades commission of sensible and dispassionate people, making determinations on reasonable grounds that could be defended.

And then in time, everybody would come round to dealing with it.

And, sure enough, last year we had the most peaceful marching season for since the start of the troubles.

The big deadlock at Drumcree has not been resolved, but the sting has been drawn from it.

Peter Hain, who was fond of creative, if illegal measures, put Orangemen on the commission, disregarding the appointment rules there, as he had done when appointing the first interim victims Commissioner.

But you would think, generally, with parades, this is a time to leave things as they are, and trust that no major troublesome forces would want to use parades to produce major social disruption, not least because the two great disruptive parties are now governing us.

We haven’t seen Paddy Ashdown’s report yet, but the leaks say it proposes that there should be a separation of the mediation and adjudication roles.

That idea was first raised by the Rev Roy Magee, one of the first members of the parades commission, who stood down when he spotted this precise weakness.  Marriage guidance counsellors can’t be divorce court judges, at least not for the same clients.

But there are suggestions that decisions should be taken now by councils, and behind them an adjudication panel set up by the office of the first and deputy first minister.

Currently the first and deputy first ministers are facing a split on the victims commission. If the DUP swings to the idea of changing the guidelines for the job, to rule out paramilitary activists as victims, they will probably have to readvertise the post.

A great precedent for co operation.

You can see what has happened.

Paddy Ashdown has concluded that Northern Ireland can function like a healthy democratic society.

Well, that’s the conclusion that Chris Patten came to when he was charged with reforming the police service and what did we get from that?  We got the Democratic Unionist Party assenting to a name change for the RUC and the dropping of a cherished royal symbol from their badge.

Look to that example, and your hopes might be raised.

Alternatively, look to the botch up over appointing a victims commission, and you think that our less elected representatives have to do with parades, the better.

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Can those who created the victims in Northern Ireland create a credible Victims Commission?

(Hearts and Minds, BBCNI )

It’s no surprise that the legalisation of our victims commissioners has stalled in political deadlock.
The dispute over victims is now the crystalllisation of the whole conflict into a single issue.

There will be no ideal future in which Peter Robinson will bounce grandchildren on his knee and tell them what a hard struggle for justice the poor Provos had. He can never be expected to empathise with the felt need of Republicans to kill and destroy. Nor will he share in their sense that it was all done for the best of reasons by the best of people.
And a white bearded Gerry Adams will not be telling his grandchildren that Unionist decency and principle saved Ulster from chaos. There is no point expecting him to share with Unionists in their sense that they were a community under attack for no other reason than that they were British, and that British is a wonderful thing to be.

Both sides see the past entirely differently. And the Alliance party proposals for running the victims commission expose those differences and put each side in danger of being upstaged by the other. That’s why resolution seems near impossible now.

To a unionist, bad things were done, mostly by republicans and the only good is that those things have stopped. To them, the understanding that there can be no hierarchy of victims, enshrined in the policy underpinning the original victims commissioner post, is merely cosmetic.
To a republican, treating all victims as equal, effectively treats all killers as equal and legitimates their armed campaign.
Suggesting that one of the four commissioners might be more equal than the others, dents that presumption.

A commission of four, broad enough to appease all corners, was a compromise before the impossibility of finding one commissioner to represent the concerns of all.
Now, ask who is to chair those four, and to speak for all, and the old unresolvable question is back.

More than 3000 ghosts haunt Stormont, unsettled and unsettling.
They made a political resolution harder and they continue to complicate it.
There is no hierarchy in the degree of confusion they create. Some are diehard Republicans, rolling in their graves, appalled at the compromise of ideology.
Some were good cops and some were bad cops. Many were children who, though they framed no political challenge in their lifetimes, dare us to forget them.
Their challenges are diverse and passionate.

For all that some of those who died had been trying to promote a war and others who died had been trying to stop it and some others who died had been trying to live ordinary lives without regard to the war at all, they are equal in this: they are all dead and they were all loved.
But if there is no hierarchy of victims, there is a hierarchy of killers.
There is one political organisation in this place which has approved far more killings than anyone else has, and recruits to its political purposes those who have done that killing, expecting them to be respected for that.

Is it right that the organisation which chose more victims than any other had equal standing in appointing victims Commissioners with some who chose none at all?
I suspect that that is the unvoiced question in the hearts of many who bemoan the continuing difficulties over appointing the victims commission.

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As you can see, this is a bit of a tryout. I’ll drop in some of my journalism as I go and shorter comments too.

I have just finished reading David Park’s outstanding novel, The Truth Commissioner and while I rate him a genius in melding the personal and the political I have to take issue with his sex scenes.

I had thought the briefest sex scene in modern Irish literature was Danny Morrison’s in The Wrong Man.

It can be quoted in full: He lay on top of her and she put it in.

But Park’s love scenes don’t happen at all. Couples get into bed and the next paragraph begins: ‘Afterwards …’

For a writer with such an eye for detail this is surely remiss.

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