Ireland (Lonely Planet, 9th Edition) - Fionn Davenport [30]
The purely commercial TV3 has a lightweight programming philosophy, with second-string US fluff to complement its diet of reality TV shows and celebrity nonsense – although its Nightly News with Vincent Browne is an intelligent barometer of the day’s affairs. The Irish-language station TG4 has the most diverse and challenging output, combining great movies (in English) with an interesting selection of dramas and documentaries as gaeilge (in Irish with English subtitles). The main British TV stations – BBC, ITV and Channel 4 – are also available in most Irish homes, through cable.
The big players in the digital TV business are the homegrown NTL and the behemoth that is Sky, who continue to make solid progress in bringing the multichannel revolution into Irish homes.
Radio
The Irish love radio – up to 85% of the population listen in on any given day. The majority tend to stick with RTE, the dominant player with three stations: Radio 1 (88.2-90FM; mostly news and discussion), Radio 2 (90.4–92.2FM; lifestyle and music) and Lyric FM (96–99FM; classical music). In Northern Ireland, the BBC rules supreme, with BBC Radio Ulster flying the local flag in addition to the four main BBC stations.
Independent competitors to RTE are owned by telecommunications impresario Denis O’Brien and include Today FM (100–102FM; music, chat and news) and the talk radio Newstalk (106–108FM; news, current affairs and lifestyle). The rest of the radio landscape is filled out by the 25 or so local radio stations that represent local issues and tastes: the northwest’s Highland Radio – heard in Donegal, Sligo, Tyrone and Fermanagh – is Europe’s most successful local radio station, with an 84% market share!
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RELIGION
About 3.7 million residents in the Republic call themselves Roman Catholic, followed by 3% Protestant, 0.5% Muslim and the rest an assortment of other beliefs including none at all. In the North, the breakdown is about 53% Protestant and 44% Catholic (with about 3% other or no religion). Most Irish Protestants are members of the Church of Ireland, an offshoot of the Church of England, and the Presbyterian and Methodist churches.
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According to a poll, 73% of Irish citizens believe in God and 22% believe in some kind of spirit or life-force. Only 4% declared themselves non-believers.
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Statistics don’t tell the whole story, though, and the influence of the Catholic Church has waned dramatically in the last decade. Most young people see the Church as irrelevant and out of step with the major social issues of the day including divorce, contraception, abortion, homosexuality and cohabitation. The terrible revelations of widespread abuse of children by parish priests, and the untidy efforts of the Church authorities to sweep the truth under the carpet, have provoked a seething rage among many Irish at the Church’s gross insensitivity to the care of its flock, while many older believers feel an acute sense of betrayal that has led them to question a lifetime’s devotion to their local parishes.
And then there’s money: increased prosperity means that the Irish have become used to being rewarded in this life, and so many have replaced God with Mammon as a focus of worship. But old habits die hard, and Sunday Mass is still a feature of the weekly calendar, especially in rural communities. Oddly enough, the primates of both the Roman Catholic Church (Archbishop Sean Brady) and the Church of Ireland (Archbishop Robert Eames) sit in Armagh, Northern Ireland, the traditional religious capital of St Patrick. The country’s religious history clearly overrides its current divisions.
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John McGahern’s simple, economical piece Amongst Women centres on well-drawn and complex yet familiar characters, in this case a west-of-Ireland family in the social aftermath of the War of Independence.
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ARTS
Literature
Of all their national traits, characteristics and cultural expressions it’s perhaps the way the Irish speak and write that best