This is a letter written to Dee Forbes while she was director general of RTÉ, sent also to chairwoman Siún Ní Raghallaigh. It refers to the omission of the Tall Ships Race to Cork of 1991 from Reeling in the Years.
Both you (Ms Forbes) and Moya Doherty in recent years ignored three letters from me as the former CEO of the 1991 event, as I searched for the truth of omitting such a prestigious and historic event from RTÉ’s Reeling in the Years programme of 1991.
Outside of the Eucharistic Congress in 1932, the Tall Ships Race in Cork rates as the second biggest event ever in the history of our state — with 800,000 people in Cork and Cobh for four days.
Tom McSweeney, Southern Correspondent and sailor, produced and edited four magnificent ‘ready for broadcast’ 30-minute programmes, sent to RTÉ each day. These were broadcast on each of the four evenings to the nation.
Yet people in RTÉ, without consultation or agreement, or even informing the Cork organising company or the Sail Training Association, appear to have commercially produced videos from these four programmes and apparently sold them on the Dublin market.
This raises many serious questions. As the organising company we invited RTÉ to transmit the event, particularly the Parade of Sail from the City quays to Cobh, and to the starting line for the next leg at Roches Point. We did not charge RTÉ for the coverage of our event, nor request any financial subvention from RTÉ to assist in funding the event.
Tom McSweeney’s superb voiced over footage, including president Robinson’s first visit to the Southern capital, taoiseach Charles Haughey taking the salute at the Parade of Sail at Cobh, and the wonderful ambience of the second city and Cobh in a joyous and festive mode. It appears as if all of this footage has been binned. This is an outrage by RTÉ.
You know, we might have forgiven RTÉ’s ‘alleged piracy’ of our footage, if it had the courtesy or professionalism to insert the 1991 Cutty Sark Tall Ships Race in Reeling in the Years, instead of deliberately ignoring it. This was an appalling lack of judgement by RTÉ.
Finally, your producer’s response to me of “the inclusion of Tall Ships Cork 1991 in Reeling in the Years did not suit the musical background” is nothing more than an unadulterated cover-up and insult to Cork by RTÉ.
The most played song on all Southern Ireland’s radio stations, including RTÉ, leading up the event was ‘My love is a Tall Ship’ by Cork balladeer and sailor Jimmy Crowley. Enough said.
Pretty pathetic performance all round by RTÉ.
Ray Cawley
Douglas
Cork
A plant-based diet for a better planet
When faced with the enormity of the challenge of climate change, it’s easy — and understandable — to be fatalistic, to adopt a head-in-the-sand attitude.
We see a country the size of China, with a population of 1.4bn people, relying on coal for more than half of its energy consumption. We see the Amazon Rainforest being destroyed for crop production (to feed animals) and to create grasslands for cattle to graze. We look at our own small country with a population of a mere five million and we think: What’s the use of me doing anything?
The choices we make today, next week, this year, will be the difference between social stability and societal collapse in the not-too-distant future. We all have to play our part.
The four highest-impact things an individual can do to tackle climate change are: Eat a plant-based diet; avoid air travel; live car-free, and have fewer children. Of those four actions, plant-based comes at a zero cost to the individual and is the only one that starts to address methane emissions immediately.
By dramatically reducing our meat intake, or better still, by
giving up eating meat entirely, and by switching to a plant-based diet, we will have a direct and immediate impact on our individual carbon footprint.
Globally, humans use 59% of all the land capable of growing crops to grow food for livestock. According to Teagasc, over 90% of agricultural land in Ireland is used to grow grass. Most of the rest is used to grow crops to feed farmed animals. We need more food, not feed.
Not everyone can go car-free, not everyone can stop flying, but pretty much everyone can adopt a plant-based diet. Such a switch is a climate no-brainer.
Gerry Boland
Keadue
Roscommon
Wiping record of sexual convictions
The recent publication by the Minister for Justice Helen McEntee of the final report and recommendations of the working group examining the disregard of convictions for certain qualifying offences related to consensual sexual activity between men, will be welcomed by many, especially in this year of many anniversaries.
Not least of which is the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington for Freedom and Jobs in August 1963 at which Martin Luther King Jr delivered his memorable address, ‘I Have a Dream’.
The organisation of the march was the responsibility of Bayard Rustin whose own commitment, as a civil rights activist, to non-violence, had an early and lasting influence on King.
Ten years earlier (1953), Rustin was arrested in Pasadena, California, for having consensual sex with two white men. He served 50 days
in jail and was registered as a sex offender. In February 2020, Rustin was posthumously pardoned by California governor Gavin Newsom. Rustin’s posthumous pardon was largely thanks to the efforts of Scott Wiener, chair of the California Legislative LGBTQ Caucus, and Shirley Weber, chair of the California Legislative Black Caucus. At the time Weber said: “Rustin was a great American who was both gay and black at a time when the sheer fact of being either or both could land you in jail.”
Newsom noted that police and prosecutors nationwide at the time used charges like vagrancy, loitering, and sodomy to punish lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people.
Only recently, after almost been written out of the narrative of the civil rights struggle has Rustin’s memory been resurrected. President Barack Obama honoured him posthumously with a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013 for the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington.
For many, Ms McEntee’s announcement of the steps she intends taking following the report’s recommendations may seem like a dream come true.
Very Rev Peadar O’Callaghan
Main St
Carrigtwohill
Debacle in RTÉ
The RTÉ debacle focussing on Ryan Tubridy’s understated and clandestine earnings can be likened to “a thundering disgrace”.
That was how the late defence minister Paddy Donegan described the late president Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh when the then minister addressed troops at Columb Barracks in Mullingar on October 18, 1976 which led the office holder to quit , just under two years into his seven-year term.
Gerry Coughlan
Dublin 24
Hide the hostels
During the Second World War, fake wooden planes and tanks were placed in many fields of south east England to deceive the Germans about where the D-Day landings in France were to take place.
In this time of a homeless crisis, that is also coupled with a refugee crisis, it might be a useful idea if groups of round bales, large fake farm machinery, and wide ditches could be commandeered and modified to provide discrete living quarters for many people in need of somewhere secure to live in? The outside natural appearances of such potential living quarters are common sights in the farming countryside and should therefore blend 100% naturally with it. In this way also they should not bother local people who are used to seeing farm machinery and ditches
always near them. Nearby roads could have special bus-stopping-points so that the new countryside dwellers could easily journey back and forth daily without any bother to nearby towns to do their shopping and their work there.
Sean O’Brien
Kilrush
Co Clare
Dee Forbes leaves a legacy of damage
The damage that Dee Forbes did during her term as director general of RTÉ will go down in history not merely for the Ryan Tubridy hidden-payments scandal (which has critically damaged the case for greater state funding of public service broadcasting in Ireland), but as a period when classical music in Ireland suffered some of its worst setbacks. She must take ultimate responsibility for the loss of an RTÉ string quartet, the running down of the National Symphony Orchestra before having it transferred to the remit of the National Concert Hall (which, even if it has experience of “housing” the orchestra, has no track record of being responsible for one), failing to resource adequately the RTÉ Concert Orchestra (it has had no principal conductor since John Wilson walked away in late 2016), side-lining its head of music (and then suppressing the post), and constantly undermining Lyric FM — and that’s before the litany of lost opportunities for Irish composers and broadcast performances is detailed.
I agree with Brian Carey when he said recently in his Business and Money column for The Sunday Times that “it’s the only real measure of leadership: Are you leaving the place in better shape than you found it?”. In terms of classical music in Ireland, Ms Forbes’ tenure was an unmitigated disaster and I fear for its ability to recover any significant extent of its former glories. Kevin Backhurst will only be able do so much when he takes the reins next month, and I worry that most of his time and energy will be absorbed by trying to clean the Augean stable.
Geoffrey Spratt
Retired Director of the Cork School of Music (1992-2016) and former UCC lecturer in music (1976-92)
CLIMATE & SUSTAINABILITY HUB
