Text Box: William Hudson Straight Talk Text Box: T p

OPINION
Text Box: For the six weeks of Lent—perhaps as a form of penance for past sins—RTÉ 1 did something different. For just under half an hour on each of the six weeks it presented us with Straight Talk, in which David Quinn, editor of The Irish Catholic, and Breda O’Brien, the Irish Times columnist, interviewed a guest, with religion as a unifying thread for their discussions, but without its being an obsession. The programme was neither lavishly produced nor heavily promoted, but managed to gain quite a respectable audience for its time slot at about 11.00 on a weeknight evening. What was most unusual about it was that—and this is a truly rare event for RTÉ—its presenters were broadly representative of the majority of the Irish television audience in their religious beliefs. This presented those among its audience having a genuine faith in the teachings of the Church and a belief that those teachings could play an important role in the working out both of our private lives and of Irish society as a whole, with an opportunity to do something that is not often possible: to watch television and relax at the same time. We did not, at least not for that half-hour, have to brace ourselves for the otherwise almost inevitable moment when the possession of a religious belief, any religious belief, would be regarded as quaint and irrelevant. It was also unusual in presenting us with a series of very effective interviews. It was not only the audience that could relax; each guest, too, seemed to have been put very much at ease by Breda and David’s civilised approach. They asked questions as if they wanted to know the answers—rather than, as so often now seems to be the case, as if they already knew both what the answers would be and that they would be wrong. These were the opposite of “blood-on-the-sand” interviews, the ritual clash of arms between interviewer and guest in which the objective is victory for the interviewer, not increased information and understanding for the audience. These interviews were informative, which we should not forget is supposed to be the point of such programmes. Breda and David were not only courteous to their guests in treating them as genuine guests, but also paid a material compliment to their audience at the same time. Clearly, they believed that their job was to direct their guest on to a topic that would interest us and then let him speak on it. By asking the questions and then standing back they left it up to us to decide for ourselves what we thought of the answers. Our not having had telegraphed to us what we should think of the answers we heard was also unusual for RTÉ, and a welcome change. Having to think for ourselves would have given most of us something close to a sense of having participated in these discussions rather than merely being exposed to them. It was also gratifying that the structure of these interviews, in demanding that we think for ourselves, for a change implied that we are all capable of doing so. Perhaps the best example of the benefit of this approach occurred during the interview with Emily O’Reilly, who was, on the eve of taking up her Ombudsman role, reflecting on her two decades in journalism. She was asked what kind of law she would like to see on abortion—and the first thing to note is that this was exactly the right question: she was asked not for generalised reflections on the issue, but precisely what she wanted Irish society to do about it. Her answer was chilling. Anyone who has had children, she said, knows “as soon as the pregnancy test goes blue that there is a child in there.” Having experienced this “you cannot look on abortion with equanimity as something that is good or right.” There was then only the briefest of pauses before she continued, following an ominous “On the other hand,” that she would be a complete hypocrite if she denied believing that a woman who had a pregnancy she couldn’t face should have the right to end it. This recalls the original Feminist pro-choice position from the Sixties: that the unborn child is a human being, but his mother has the right to kill him if she wants. It was quickly abandoned in favour of the easier-to-sell argument that altogether denies the humanity of the child. In this, science and technology were—as they must always ultimately be—on the side of the Church. In the decades since then, it became ever clearer to all of us—through, for example, seeing the ultrasound image of a developing foetus or our understanding that little Shay has had blue eyes and a gift for maths from the moment the genes from the sperm and egg assorted themselves within a single cell—that there is no point before which an unborn child is less than a human being. Advances in medical science and the broad popular knowledge of the even more dramatic developments in genetics have already made the not-a-human-being argument untenable for any well-informed and intelligent person, and Emily O’Reilly is unquestionably a very well-informed and intelligent person. She has to accept the humanity of the unborn; but to remain pro-choice must always add “on the other hand.” We don’t, as a society, accept the killing of human beings—but Emily O’Reilly would have us make this one exception. This stark paradox, in the hands of different interviewers, would have been seized upon, explored and exposed—undoubtedly causing some discomfort to their guest in the process. This, however, would have been against the implicit rules of engagement for Straight Talk. Breda and David would not have got to this interesting point in their discussion if their guest had understood they were looking for a crack to get their crowbars into, in order to knock a hole in the defensive wall of her beliefs. She would simply have applied a bit of fresh mortar before the programme, presenting them and us with a smooth and bland surface, from which we should have learned nothing more than that she was a dab hand with a trowel. Others have expressed the opinion that both Breda and David were far too polite in general, and let pass many opportunities, such as this one, to closely question and challenge their guests. Clearly, I would disagree. I believe that they were perfectly polite, and that it was precisely their lack of ruthless edginess that created the “opportunities” they are accused of missing. That was the whole point of Straight Talk: those were opportunities for us, not them. We were supposed to do our own thinking, and they gave us a great deal to think about. We could do with a lot more straight talk from RTÉ. p