Malachi O'Doherty

But when we got Jackson home, some of my father’s thinking about cats began to make sense.
Cats brings coughing and sneezing into a house and it would have been natural for countryfolk of a couple of generations ago to connect that in their minds with tuberculosis.  Indeed, they probably saw tuberculosis symptoms exacerbated by cat allergies.
I give Jackson the secret nickname Toxin.
We have had three other cats over the years in the house and had never noticed that they weren’t quite as allergenic as this one, but that, ironically, was probably because the others were surly withdrawn and traumatised cats.  Smudge had been put out of Twinbrook by the Provos, at least his family had.  Skitter had been found on a skip in a shoebox with her siblings when she was only a few hours old.  The kittens were distributed among teachers at the school where my wife works, and Maureen hand raised hers.  It was virtually feral.  But cats had been with us for all our time together so we hadn’t noticed how toxic they were.  Maureen’s asthma just seem inevitable and routine.
It had cleared up after Skitter died so we should have seen the cat connection plainly then.
But I wanted to surprise her and knew how much she loved cats and thought that on balance the happiness that she would get from having another one in the house would weigh against the occasional asthmatic coughing and spluttering.  And sure wasn’t the new inhaler working wonders anyway?
And it also seems that after years of the surly Skitter, the arrival of an affectionate cat would be a particular treat.
Toxin was lethal.  I, who had not been aware of any allergic reaction to previous cats, suffered puffy eyes and hard flaky snot.  Maureen hugged and kissed him and doted on him.  What was the point in having an affectionate cat if you couldn’t do that?
So I trawled the net for advice on how to survive little Toxin.
Some said that it might be possible to teach a little kitten to enjoy being washed.  The allergenic chemicals are in the saliva which the cat licks all over its body.
Toxin’s affectionate disposition gave way to raw savagery when he was introduced to water and shampoo.
We seemed to make some small progress with spray-on shampoo that could be brushed off, but Toxin sat blithely licking it off when I’d finished.
And the heaving and the coughing and spluttering went on.
Except for a couple of days when we were away in Scotland, only to resume ferociously when Toxin lept into her lap to welcome her home.
I took on the fathering role, which is to say that I did the nasty jobs, like taking toxin to the vet, first for a checkup and then to have his balls off.  I had fed him antibiotic tablets twice a day, clenching his jaw shut to force him to swallow them.  And I gave him eyedrops.  At first he accepted this interference in his privacy but progressively his resistance increased until I had to wrap him in a thick towel and clench him firmly while he straightened like a rod and shot out his claws. At one point he even barked at me.
Maureen’s worry was that if we sent him to a new home he would be traumatised, but he was acquiring the sense already that the world was against him, or at least that I was against him.
We found friends on Facebook who would take him.
He’ll have children to play with; he’ll be happy, I assured her.
I was now as fastidious as any official cat protector.
For Maureen, it was like watching a child go out into the world.  Her tears were for little Jackson and her hopes that he would be happy.
I admit, that my own sympathy had not risen that high.

My father hated cats.
He thought that they spread TB. He wouldn’t have a dog in the house either but he wouldn’t even have had a cat in the coal shed.
He was a Donegal peasant who had refined his manners enough for the city back streets and the pub and no more. He was from among people who were plain and harsh, which is what the Donegal rain would do to anyone.
So one thing he would not understand if he was around today is the procedure you go through to get a cat.
If he had wanted one for catching mice – and he didn’t because he didn’t mind mice – but if he had, this is how he would have done it.
He’d have gone to a neighbour.
‘Have you drowned that litter yet? he would have said.
And if the neighbour hadn’t got round to it; ‘well, leave one out of the bag for me, will you.’
He spoke to people as if he was giving orders even when he was asking a favour.
‘Cats and magpies. They kill for pleasure. Only people who don’t know them could love them.’
Well, my wife loves them and our last cat – a beast so grumpy that I fancy my da might have softened to it – crossed over to the other side last month, taking its eight surplus lives with it. And I chose to surprise her with another.
There are plenty of places to get a cat, but it turned out not to be as easy as just turning up at the Cats’ Protection League with a plastic cage to carry one home in.
I went with my niece, who is even further along the family tree from the Donegal roots and therefore a sweeter nicer person. She loves cats and was almost purring herself at the sight of pictures of them in the reception area when a woman greeted us with.
‘Lovely, but have you had your home visit yet?’
I turned into my father in reaction to that.
‘Why do we need a home visit?’
‘No need to be aggressive’, said the woman. I thought I had come to do her a favour and take one of her cats off her hands. She saw herself more as a social worker in an adoption agency.

‘Do you have children?’ I didn’t like this. Play coy with a social worker and she’ll suspect all sorts of reasons for it.
I said I would like to ask questions first, before discussing my personal history and opening my family circumstances for inspection. Hmmmm. She had clearly handled difficult people before. She had a strategy.
She handed me over to a male member of staff who would show me their kittens, and then, if I wanted to proceed, I could arrange a home visit and be inspected too.

That seemed reasonable.
The kittens were mostly scrawny and scarred wee things. One of them liked ham, said the man. They clearly weren’t what I wanted anyway. I was looking for something more – ornamental. So we went on to Assisi, another animal shelter which the Cats’ Protection man said didn’t insist on home visits.
There we picked Jackson, an almost totally black three month old kitten who extended a pleading paw through the bars of his cage. There are very few real black cats left, apparently, since the line was almost expunged in the purge of witches’ familiars.

Jackson, once we had changed his name, would fit in well. First we had to make a ‘donation’ and fill in a form.
He whimpered in the plastic cage on the office counter while I detailed all my past cats and their deaths: Smudge, Misery and Skitter – two roadkills one diabetes and euthanasia – not a good record. I then had to agree to a future home visit – which hasn’t happened yet – and sign a commitment not to let Jackson go outside the house.
I had got off lightly.
A young couple beside us had chosen kittens to bring home. ‘The manager wants you to bring your children here so that we can observe how they interact with the kittens before we let you take them.’
These people were entirely agreeable. They read this perhaps as confirmation that Assisi was just the sort of outfit they wanted to receive cats from, run by cat lovers like themselves.
My da would have told them to get stuffed.

Great news. Alan Murray, the blogger charged with harassment for discussing public figures on his blog – the way any journalist would – has had his day in court and been acquitted!

What were the police thinking of, pursuing such a ridiculous case?

Clonard

This is my report on the visit of Church of Ireland Bishop Harold Miller to the Clonard Novena in Belfast in June.

http://www.malachi.podcastpeople.com/posts/24955

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?