Eoghan Harris

TO Tralee, to conduct a weeklong skills course at the ETB National Digital Skills Centre with film, television and radio students from all over Ireland.

Staying in a town where Martin Ferris has a few friends sharpens my focus on Gerry Adams’s forthcoming statement on the Brian Stack murder.

Meantime, my two perks are a spacious room in the mellow Meadowlands Hotel, and daily lunch at Stokers Lodge with my old friend Paul Dolan.

Paul pioneered the teaching of practical film and video skills at the former Fas centre in Tralee, now the Kerry Education and Training Board.

Being a craft as well as an art, broadcasting requires practical skills training rather than the kind of abstract waffle about feminism and film favoured by universities.

Lunch with Paul means listening to him hold forth on the need to steer more students towards apprenticeships on the German model.

Paul has a powerful case. We have the highest percentage of school-leavers at university in Europe.

And no, that’s not good news.

Many students are shoehorned into academic courses that don’t suit them and drop out after a year.

But even those who graduate find it tough to get jobs that justify the time and expense of earning a university degree.

Paul believes many more school-leavers should be encouraged to learn a lucrative skilled trade that would give them secure and steady employment.

Controversially, he believes that pressure to secure a college degree comes mostly from Irish mothers who prefer their children clutching a scroll rather than a spanner.

Here I must confess to a certain hypocrisy. Like most men, I long to be, like Paul, handy with my hands and able to do stuff around the house.

Thanks to Lidl I have the tools. But using them is another matter.

My wife calls my shed of surplus gadgets ‘Idle from Lidl’.

Last summer, baffled by a sulky petrol-driven chainsaw, I asked my architect neighbour John Austin for advice.

“John, know anything about chainsaws?”

“Just enough to keep well away from them.”

Because his mother was not a snob, Paul is a skilled motor mechanic, who can also plaster, plumb, wire a house and fix anything with moving parts.

He recalls: “My mother liked a man with oil on his hands. What she called clean dirt.” WEDNESDAY The rest of the week looks like not-so-clean political dirt, and Gerry Adams’s attempt to whitewash the Provo past.

His Dail statement on the murder of Brian Stack sheds no light but merely muddies the dark waters.

Mary Lou McDonald and Eoin O Broin are missing from the chamber. A sure sign Sinn Fein is in trouble.

Unlike most of my colleagues, I am not anxious that Adams be forced to step down in the near future.

Plausible smoothies like McDonald and policy wonks like O Broin would be more successful at burying Sinn Fein’s shadowy past.

Micheal Martin addresses the issue with the authority and command of detail that drives Sinn Fein mad.

But Alan Farrell of Fine Gael foolishly shifts focus from Adams by inviting Martin Ferris and Dessie Ellis to contribute.

Farrell is foolish because while these two have serious IRA convictions, he should know that many media mandarins will seize on the distraction. THURSDAY Predictably RTE News pushes the Stack murder and happily follows the Ferris and Ellis hares.

Shockingly, but not surprisingly, RTE presenters all repeat the same mantras about alleged abuse of Dail privilege by Alan Farrell.

Audrey Carville on Morning Ireland, the Sean O’Rourke show, Martina Fitzgerald on the midday news and Miriam O’Callaghan on Prime Time are fixated on Farrell rather than in pressing Adams on the murder of Brian Stack.

Sean O’Rourke works himself into a rhetorical rage that would require Micheal Martin to accept that what O’Rourke called the realpolitik of the peace process means turning a blind eye to murder.

Micheal Martin was having none of it. He had done his homework. What he left of O’Rourke was hoovered up by Senator Michael McDowell.

Later, Prime Time gave us a glimpse of the flawed reasoning behind the groupthink that had gripped RTE reporters all day.

Two questions showed that RTE presenters think any attempt by elected politicians to ask Adams awkward questions is taboo. Why? Because they might benefit from it!

Thus Miriam O’Callaghan to Austin Stack: “Are you worried that the horror that befell your family, the murder of your father, could be used by other political parties now to get at Gerry Adams?”

Thus David McCullagh’s parroting the same loopy line to Niall Collins: “Fianna Fail are playing politics with this, aren’t you?”

But if Martin, Kenny and Howlin shut up, who will put Gerry Adams under pressure? RTE presenters? Don’t make me laugh.

Proving that all media mandarins take in each other’s washing, Vincent Browne repeated RTE’s tired tropes. And then some.

According to Browne, Austin Stack “intruded” into Sinn Fein’s press conference. He thought “this fellow” was “hyping” things up and being “egged on”.

But the Stack brothers cannot be beaten or distracted by sullen media mandarins because they are responding to more powerful passions rooted deep in human nature.

The death of a father has flattened many of us. But the memory of a murdered father is a grief that goes much deeper.

The Stacks are driven by a relentless righteous rage to seek justice, and I believe nothing will deflect them from that mission.

Accordingly those who think the Stacks should swallow murder so that Adams can continue his version of the peace process are wasting their time.

As Micheal Martin told Sean O’Rourke: the families are not going away.

How fitting the finish of the 1916 centenary year sees the Provos choking on lies about their murderous past. FRIDAY To Killarney with Paul Dolan to see Tom Cooper’s classic 1935 film The Dawn, digitally remastered by Brian Nolan and a brilliant team from the ETB digital skills centre.

We are bucked up by the report of Professor John Hegarty bravely belling the university snobbery cat at the Oireachtas education committee.

He said: “There is definitely, among parents, a snob value in the sense that university and higher education are better and the place to go, even if the student is totally unsuited.”

Professor Hegarty also pointed out that there has been a dramatic fall-off in the numbers taking part in apprenticeships and skills training.

Those who doubt the value of practical skills training should have been in Cinema Killarney to see Nolan’s stunning restoration of The Dawn.

Michelle Cooper Galvin, grandaughter of the technical genius who made one of the world’s first independent, feature-length talkies, said she hoped The Dawn would be used as an educational tool. Me too.

Minister Heather Humphreys should see it soon. Ahead of its time, it treats the War of Independence with humanity as well as heroics.

‘The Stack brothers can’t be beaten by sullen media mandarins’