The first gig I had on radio was It Says in the Papers during Morning Ireland. It was often a nervy experience. On the weeks I was scheduled to do it, I would live with the constant terror of sleeping in: which caused me to not sleep at all. I would arrive into Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) a bit dopey, the sun hardly in the sky, and regularly forget to curtail my natural inclination to speak too quickly.
But over time, and with considerable patience from the programme editors, I managed to calm down. And then I fell in love with it. Not just the item itself, but the very idea of it; that my words and voice were invisibly spreading across the country while it woke up.
I could imagine people making breakfast or opening shops or getting into tractors. In a madly romantic way, it reminded me of the last paragraph in James Joyce’s The Dead, where snow falls across Dublin, the central plain of Ireland, the Shannon and a graveyard in Oughterard: disparate places, yet all mysteriously linked.
A few weeks back, I got the chance to bring these two ideas together by doing an outside broadcast from a lighthouse: one that perches on the edge of the Hook peninsula in County Wexford. It’s been there for over eight centuries, it’s one of the oldest lighthouses on the planet and it’s rather magnificent.
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Lighthouses have also occupied that part of my brain, because they do something similar: they project friendly warnings to mariners, miles out to sea; remind them that, despite the distance, they are not entirely alone.
A cargo ship breaks down on the other side of the world, and you can’t get ketchup in the supermarket
The show was going rather well too, until it wasn’t. On outside broadcasts, the signal is sent through some process I don’t quite understand back to the studio. Occasionally, it can get distorted, causing the human voice to sound metallic and android-like, or it can cut out intermittently. Into the second hour of the show,we started to get that. Then it cut out altogether. Then it came back. Then it cutout again. Then it came back just long enough to broadcast a contributor dropping an F-bomb. Then it cut out completely.
If Hollywood has taught us anything, it is that if previously reliable audio signals start to go wonky, it’s the prelude to an alien attack aimed at trashing our planet. Luckily, the alien invasion didn’t happen, and there were plenty of possible non-alien causes for the glitch; mostly outside our control.
Anyway, we’re perfectly capable of trashing the planet ourselves. On the drive back to Dublin, the now-working radio catalogued all the woes: families that had to choose between heating or food, small businesses that were barely hanging on, hospital waiting lists, the housing crisis, possible trade wars, ecological collapse. And much of it, wholly or in part, was caused by events elsewhere. There’s a war in Ukraine and our energy bills are astronomical.
A cargo ship breaks down on the other side of the world, and you can’t get ketchup in the supermarket. So much of the way we live is dependent on systems that, most of the time, we are barely aware of; before they break down and reveal just how fragile they are.
Coming off the M50, there was a sudden and unexplained queue at the exit. Dozens of cars inched along, pumping carbon into the air that is altering the climate of our fragile planet, that is changing the lives of people on other continents; and which will, in time, change ours.
Forty minutes later, the cause of the delay revealed itself: all it took was one broken down car to choke the flow of traffic, the driver probably unaware of the massive queue it had caused.
The sky was starting to darken now. Back in Hook Head, the light switched on, sweeping out to sea. Eight hundred and fifty years later, it still works. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.