1^st May 2024
Ms. Ann-Marie Power, Head of Arts & Culture, RTÉ

Dear Ms. Power and RTÉ colleagues,

As members of the English Department at Maynooth University, we write to express our concern at what we have learned of the decision last month to have RTÉ Radio 1’s flagship arts and culture programme Arena rescind the possibility of an interview with the Palestinian-Canadian poet and activist Rafeef Ziadah.

Ziadah’s Irish tour (organised by our current Arts & Minds Festival Writer-in-Residence, Donal O’Kelly) has brought her poetry performance Let It Be A Tale to several venues around the country, including the Pavilion in Cork, the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and An Taibhdhearc, Galway. Let It Be A Tale, as you will know, takes its title from “If I Must Die”, the very powerful poem by the Palestinian poet and academic Refaat Alareer, who was killed in an IDF airstrike in Gaza last December. As the genocide in Gaza continues, it is hard to imagine a more urgent cultural offering than Ziadah’s, which presents her own poems, about Palestinian history, identity and experience under occupation and bombardment, in tribute to her murdered friend. Audiences in Ireland certainly seem to agree with this sentiment: the performances in Cork, Galway, Dublin and at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast rapidly sold out. We have also been very proud to host Ziadah for a public interview at Maynooth.

It is our understanding that, having expressed some interest in featuring Ziadah on an April episode of Arena, the production team reversed course by saying that her work was a difficult item to cover on an arts and culture show. It was suggested that one of RTÉ current affairs programmes could provide more “balance.”

This leads us to wonder about some recent items which received (excellent) coverage on Arena. Looking only at episodes within the past month, was it deemed necessary, for instance, to provide “balance” for an item on the new memoir by Salman Rushdie (whose novel The Satanic Verses was met with a fatwa in 1989, and who was blinded in a violent attack in 2022 whilst giving a talk on the subject of politically exiled writers)? For an interview with the Northern Irish poet Paul Muldoon (whose new collection explores, among other things, the Belfast pogroms of the 1920s)? Or for a piece on the team behind the IMMA exhibition We Realised The Power Of It (about a radical film collective focused on questions of gender, class and the Irish ‘national question’)?

We would hope not; that is, we are very glad that items on these artists were made available to Arena listeners. We are very glad, too, that listeners had the chance to hear interviews with Alex Garland (the filmmaker behind Civil War ) and the visual artist Eimear Walshe (currently at the Venice Biennale with an exhibition tracing the modern-day legacy of 19th century land contestation in Ireland); that is, that their complex and painful subjects were not deemed too difficult for an arts and culture programme to cover.

Furthermore, the argument that Ziadah’s tour was more relevant to a current affairs programme than to an arts and culture programme seems odd to us, given the deliberate cultural component of the genocide. The destruction of Gaza being perpetrated by the Israeli state is indeed a multi-layered genocide which ranges far beyond the physical destruction of infrastructure and the killing of men, women and children. It is part of a broader destructive process, designed to sever cultural continuity and undermine Palestinian heritage, identity and existence. Among the dead are 45 Palestinian writers, artists, and cultural heritage activists. Israeli destruction of Gaza has also included targeted attacks on cultural institutions: 32 cultural centres and 12 museums have been destroyed, along with nine libraries and eight publishing houses. Over 195 historical buildings, 9 archaeological sites, and 19 universities have been bombed.

We understand, of course, that production schedules and line-ups change all the time. We are, many of us, admirers of Arena and of the platform it offers for artists and for considered conversations about art and culture. Many of us are also past contributors to the programme. Therefore it pains us to voice this criticism; but in the face of the savagery currently being unleashed in Palestine upon artists, academics, journalists and upon people of every occupation and walk of life, as well as upon innocent children, we write to ask for an explanation for what we see as the censoring of an essential, brilliant and yes, difficult, voice. In the face of genocide, why should an artist be balanced, or be countered with “balance”? Should Irish and Irish-based artists continue to provide Arena with content when a Palestinian peer has had that platform rescinded?

We would welcome clarification from RTÉ on these questions, and we hope that the production team will rethink its policy. Our Palestinian colleagues are being massacred. Few things seem so vital as to create space for their voices.

Sincerely,

Conrad Brunstrom, Head of Department
Belinda McKeon, Associate Professor of Creative Writing
Catherine Gander, Associate Professor of American Literature
Denis Condon, Lecturer in Irish Film
Michael G Cronin, Lecturer in English and Irish Studies
Íde Corley, Lecturer in English and Postcolonial Studies
Sinéad Kennedy, Senior University Tutor
Stephen O’Neill, Associate Professor in English
Conor McCarthy, Associate Professor in English
Caterina Macnamara, Executive Assistant
Naoise Murphy, Lecturer in English
Rita Sakr, Assistant Professor in Postcolonial and Global Literatures
Karl O’Hanlon, Lecturer in English
Pat Palmer, Professor of English
Amanda Bent, Administrative Officer
Moynagh Sullivan, Professor of English
Paul Lynch, Distinguished Writing Fellow
Oona Frawley, Associate Professor in English