Jennifer Horgan: RTÉ Radio needs some fine tuning when it comes to regional reporting
RTÉ is our national broadcaster. Its job is to serve the country.
I’d time to luxuriate in RTÉ Radio One last Monday. Schools were starting late, so my usually frantic lunch-making was calmer. I sipped my coffee, listening at my leisure.
Aside from the relaxed pace, something felt different.
Staggered school openings weren’t the only changes brought in by the cold snap.
Yes, on this occasion, on this very cold, dark January morning, I realised something: I was listening to a genuinely national broadcast — an inclusive, holistic capturing of our small country. A broadcast without the assumption that everyone listening was listening from Dublin.
I’ve never heard so many references to locations and services in Cork, down to individual hospitals and schools. They sounded odd in the Dublin-infused tones of the newsreaders — like over-sized marbles rolling around in their mouths. Our marbles! Cork’s very own marbles! The CUH no less! St Finbarr’s!
What was this strange awakening in our capital? This acknowledgement of life beyond the Pale? And what was I feeling? A kind of pride? Something akin to watching Cillian Murphy, the boy from up our road, raising his mighty Oscar?
Only, well, is not the Oscars, and Ireland is not so big that our national broadcaster can’t provide a national picture. As proven by Monday’s broadcast — you can include a few regional headlines, and still cover Dublin and the rest of the world.
I’m willing to admit that it might just be me, this feeling of being ignored, hailing as I do from the second city, that bruised little sibling of the Republic. Some might argue that our absolute devotion to the rebel county is related to how inconsequential we are made to feel by self-important Dubs.
Beyond Cork though, listeners must notice the disproportionate attention given to stories like the infamous bus shelter, or the problematic Dublin portal to New York. Too often, geography seems to determine significance. For example, in Cork this week, our dockland project looks in grave danger after An Bórd Pleanála’s decision to refuse planning to fertiliser firm Goulding. Apart from Eoin English's excellent reporting on this very significant issue in the , I have heard little about it elsewhere in the media. I have heard plenty about Dublin.
And surely everyone beyond the capital gets irritated by the casual references to specific parts of its city. If you don’t know a small urban road in the capital, you’re certainly made to feel like you should
Sadly, RTÉ Radio One presenters don’t offer much solace — all being decidedly Dublin-hued. A prerequisite to working as a daily RTÉ presenter seems to be attendance at a Dublin university, and a decision to live there from a very early age, early enough to cast off any remotely rural traits.
Besides true-blue Dubs like Joe Duffy and Miriam O’Callaghan, many presenters started life in other parts of the country, but came to the capital early doors, to further their studies, shedding their regional accents accordingly.
Ray D'Arcy comes from Kildare but studied at Trinity. Mary Wilson has a traditional farming background but studied Law at DIT; she settled in Dublin in 1990. Sarah McInerney is a Galway native but studied journalism at DCU.
This Dublin migration, at least decades ago, could be explained away by the lack of journalism courses outside Dublin — another part of this story — and our failure to decentralise education effectively, until recently.
But even now, the Dublin funnel persists, with younger presenters adopting Dublin-friendly personas.
Louise Duffy was born in Crossmolina in Co Mayo but moved to Dublin early to study at the Dublin Institute of Technology. rightly points out that her “Mayo tones” are “now shot through with a soupçon of south Co Dublin.”
Oliver Callan moved from his native Monaghan to study and live in Dublin. He comes from the same town as Patrick Kavanagh no less — cultural capital aplenty. Not that he felt the benefit of it.
“My Monaghan accent is long gone at this stage,” he has said. “As a student, it was partly thinking that to make it in the big smoke, you must hide where you come from. Everyone thought you were in the IRA in 1999 if you came from Monaghan.”
We hold out hope. Perhaps we will soon hear people with undiluted regional accents on RTÉ One, boasting qualifications from Cork, Limerick, or Galway.
We will have to watch this space or listen to it.
Indeed, given the current homogeny of RTÉ One presenters, I do wonder if RTÉ has properly vetted Brendan O’Connor.
I mean, the man hosts one of the country’s most popular shows at the weekend and … God, I’m not even sure I should say it...
He went to University College Cork.
RTÉ must be concerned that O’Connor hasn’t had a full ironing out of his regional creases. The man seems almost stubborn in his retention of the Cork inflection, and he rebelliously chats with other Corkonians on air.
On the back of my query, a spokesperson for RTÉ explains that “RTÉ is committed to reflecting and celebrating Ireland's rich diversity, which is much broader than where our on-air presenters come from, although that remains a factor, and broader than RTÉ Radio 1.”
They point out that “RTÉ lyric fm for the most part broadcasts from its studios in Limerick, and RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta broadcasts from its studios in Connemara (Casla) Tralee and Letterkenny.”
The optics aren’t great, are they? Must non-Dublin locations make do with only less prominent broadcasting? Is it a pre-requisite to live in Dublin?
Are regional studios not a possibility for at least one or two mainstream shows? Could RTÉ One not learn from Radio na Gaeltachta, offering news from the four provinces without difficulty on every bulletin?
There seems to be more diversity when it comes to music, and a couple of Munster-based correspondents assure me they’re invited onto radio panels regularly enough, so we can’t complain there. However, there seems to be a few ‘go to’ voices — a tendency that might not create much of a pipeline from regional locations.
I was also told by a female journalist that they’re asked on air solely to meet a gender quota. Disheartening indeed. This business of representation is certainly a tricky one.
The RTÉ spokesperson also points to “a number of regional correspondents who report on local and regional news stories across our television, radio, and online services.” This is true and must be commended. However, the question is — are they being used well enough?
RTÉ’s south-east correspondent at the time, Damien Tierney, left RTÉ in 2019 claiming the broadcaster had “little interest in regional news". His studio in Waterford was producing 220 news packages a year in the early 2000s but this fell to between 50 and 60 a year in the last seven years, he said at the time.
Catching up with him this week, he acknowledges the good work done by the broadcaster.
“RTÉ has made big strides over the last few years to address the inadequacies of the system — a system that means there is not enough regional news on the main bulletins. It’s not just a problem with RTÉ but for national news organisations around the world. I still think they could do more with the resources they have at their disposal.” He suggests a half hour standalone slot on RTÉ television with contributions and news items from around the country.
I could get on board with that, and even more so if it were on radio. Fellow non-Dubliners, sitting alongside me here, in the cold shadow of the Pale — could you?
After all, RTÉ is our national broadcaster. Its job is to serve the country. I shouldn’t have noticed feeling represented. I shouldn’t have noticed, but I did.
