As recession bites, the attitude of the Irish to immigrants is showing a change for the worse. But for the presenters of NewsTalk’s Global Village, that only makes their work more necessary. Viktor Posudnevsky joins them in the studio
‘F*** off n***** lovers!” The F-word and the N-word combined in one sentence might be too shocking for some, but Dil Wickremasinghe – presenter of NewsTalk FM’s Global Village – is well used to it by now.
“Initially the text messages we got, I’ll be honest with you, brought me to tears,” she says.
“Dil was a bit naïve at the start,” adds John O’Donovan, who has produced Global Village since its launch in June last year. “She’d only had good experiences since she moved to Ireland. But I said to her ‘Look, you’re gonna get a kickback, you’re gonna realise there’s an awful lot of small-minded idiots out there.’”
The programme goes out live, and interactive. The text messages, as they flood in, flash up on computer screens for both presenter and producer to see. In one of their earlier programmes, as she was interviewing her guest, Wickre-masinghe read the aforementioned abuse on the screen before her. “This almost made me cry in the studio,” she recalls.
“We’ve had those types of texts in several times,” says O’Donovan. “When we’re talking to someone from Africa, this is invariably the sort of thing you get from some ignoramus.”
And he suggests that this negatively disposed part of their audience is growing bigger, or at least more vocal.
“Because the economy has changed, the attitudes of listeners are starting to change,” he says. “Before there was a lot of welcoming, but now it’s more ‘We don’t want to bring any more in, let them go home if they’re going home’ – that kind of attitude.”
But for the duo, offensive texts are the least of their worries – in this time of recession it is tough for a programme like Global Village to exist at all. Integration is not the sexiest of topics, and most Irish people have far too many problems of their own to lend an ear to immigrants’ concerns.
As a result, it came as little surprise that one of the first programmes to fall under RTÉ’s cost-cutting drive was the multicultural Spectrum, formerly broadcast on Radio One. With Spectrum gone, Global Village is now the only integration-themed show broadcast on mainstream radio.
According to ratings, Global Village is doing well and has added listeners since its launch. But the slot provided by NewsTalk is an unpopular one, the show has received little to no publicity from the station, and the resources devoted to it are scarce. Whereas RTÉ’s Spectrum had a full-time researcher and a full-time producer working on the largely pre-recorded programme all week (not to mention outside contributors and the presenter’s input), Global Village is put together by just two people, literally when they get a break from their day jobs.
The production process consists of “lots of e-mails, lots of phone calls,” says O’Donovan, an experienced journalist who teaches radio at the Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology. Meanwhile, Wickremasinghe works all week providing training in diversity and equality. Quite often it is only two or three hours before the actual broadcast on Saturday that the two meet each other and their guests to discuss that week’s programme.
With a background that almost personifies the terms ‘multiculturalism’, ‘integration’ and ‘diversity’, Wickremasinghe brings a unique wealth experience to the programme. Born in Italy to Sri Lankan parents, she moved to the Middle East and worked for an international airline before coming to Ireland in 2000.
“I consider myself a citizen of the world,” she says. “If you ask me where I’m from I can’t even answer that question.” She is also open about her sexuality and is a campaigner for the rights of same-sex couples.
With an affable, bubbly personality and the ability to strike up a conversation with anyone – all the qualities of a good chat show host – it’s little wonder that she jumped at the chance to present Global Village, after cutting her teeth on community radio in Blanchardstown.
So with all their combined experience, how does the Global Village team approach their show – and their audience?
“Pretty much at the start we decided we didn’t want the programme to be confrontational,” says O’Donovan, “but a programme that’d be able to give an understanding between the Irish community and the new Irish communities... Before we have the guests on they’re kind of wary of what way the interview is going to go. But we assure them that that’s not the way the programme is made.”
“I always try to show my guests in the best light,” adds Wickremasinghe, who makes no qualms about her lack of a journalistic background. “We prefer to talk about things like music and sport. We don’t talk as much about policy.”
Indeed, the pair have found that it is human interest stories that elicit the most response, rather than discussions about abstract subjects like immigration policy. They explain how they were “inundated” with text messages during a live interview with a Muslim family where the issue of banning the hijab in schools was discussed.
“It was on both sides, negative and positive,” says Wickremasinghe. “I couldn’t keep up with messages as they were coming in. But [the family] were brilliant because they answered every single question. In the end you could see that the texts were getting less and less prejudiced.”
O’Donovan says the programme is all about showing the real faces of people behind the statistics. “What we try to do is get an individual from Nigeria, Romania, Poland, wherever and say ‘This is the person.’ You kind of get an insight into them. It’s not about policy, it’s only about their life, only about their kids. They’re telling you about the same sort of problems that everybody in this country has: trying to get their kids to school, trying to get them educated, trying to get them integrated, playing football, playing music...”
Both programme-makers believe that the human angle should get more and better coverage on Ireland’s airwaves, especially in difficult economic times when tensions flare up and people tend to blame each other for their troubles.
“Imagine if we went out at 12 o’clock on Wednesdays,” wonders Wickremasinghe. “That would be fantastic, so many people would listen in…” n
Global Village airs on Saturdays at 7pm on NewsTalk 106-108 FM.
