Wednesday, December 12, 2007

RTE politically correct? It's still 1957 every day ...

The Republic has been abuzz with allegations of 'political correctness gone mad' after the Catholic Church was forced to drop the word 'crib' from an advertisement on RTE.

It seems that some mandarins at RTE HQ expressed concern that the word 'crib' for an advertisement for, er, cribs might break the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland code forbidding 'advertising directed towards a religious end'.

Now, the offending word has been excised from the ads by the Church's publishing arm, Veritas, and - barring the complaints of all-Ireland Primate Sean Brady - all's right with the world.

It is, of course, lunacy to ban 'crib', but isn't this the same RTE which until very recently had the Cross of St Bridget as its corporate logo and still (admittedly in a much softened form) broadcasts the Angelus every day at noon and every evening at six?

Ok, it may not be an ad exactly but isn't this programming 'directed towards a religious end'?

The reverential tone of the announcers, the hushed pause for thought, the tolling of the bell for a very specifically Catholic prayer, is like some hangover of De Valera's Ireland.

It is not just the broadcasting of a religious service.

The Angelus is a statement by the state broadcaster that really - even in these ecumenical, progressive days - 'Catholic' being synonymous with being 'Irish' is still a handy enough rule of thumb.

Forget about falling church attendances, the influx of a new immigrant population and everyone riding the Celtic Tiger, it's still 1957 twice a day in Ireland.

The anachronism is even more insulting when you consider that in this era of digital/satelite broadcasting, RTE is now, ironically, broadcasting to the whole 32 counties of the island.

A proportion of the population - driven mad by the lack of anything to watch on BBC and UTV - are channel surfing like never before.

Whisper it quietly, but I would be fairly confident that there a few Northern Prods who find themselves washed up on RTE's shores every now and again.

I suspect that three minutes of Catholic dogma before the news doesn't strike many of them as evidence of the Republic being a truly inclusive society.

You can't open a newspaper without pundits yakketty yakking about 'the new dispensation' since the Belfast Agreement. If you were to believe them, all's changed, changed utterly.

Perhaps, the boys at Donnybrook should wake up to the fact.
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