A MODEST PROPOSAL

I don't know if Eilis O'Hanlon went to university or what she studied there. But reading her latest diatribe in The Sunday Independent against Michael D. Higgins, I wouldn't be in the least surprised if she was schooled in that student debating society environment where advocates never ever listen to the opinions of their opponents.

Her piece is a classic of misrepresentation. In order to attack him, she totally and scandalously distorts what he said in his Hot Press interview before chastising him. Michael D. makes some unexceptional, almost trivial comments about the role of film and rock in university and secondary school cultural studies and, whether through malice or over-excitable ignorance, O'Hanlon misrepresents Michael D. as some educational vandal, purging Milton from school curricula in favour of Jackie Collins and doubtless, frog-marching Brendan Kennelly and David Norris off to some indoctrination gulag where they can learn to lecture their Trinity students on the poetics of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love.

Flick through this issue and you'll read what he said. Responding to Joe Jackson's prompting, the Minister merely stated that university cultural studies should take account of U2 and Neil Jordan and furthermore, that it mightn't be a bad idea if secondary students had a better idea of the video culture that surrounds them.

That last suggestion is neither novel nor radical. Indeed I've lost count of the number of Catholic Church educational groups from all backgrounds who've proposed the same. Besides what Michael D. suggests already happens. Over the years, I and other Hot Press writers have been regularly requested to help both secondary and third-level students with assignments about U2 or the Irish rock industry.

Few if any have been trivial. More typically, some projects have been seriously sociological or the work of commerce students, quite correctly and understandably interested in the business of music.

POETIC CONNECTIONS

But facts will never deter a ranting pundit. Typical of O'Hanlon's distorting debating tricks is her exclusion of Neil Jordan. Michael D. mentions both U2 and Neil Jordan but O'Hanlon's ploy is to always demolish nuance. Even elitists think Neil Jordan is cool, so she removes him from Michael D.'s remarks and instead rewrites the interview to include Jackie Collins who Michael D. never mentioned at all, at all. I can only add that I'm glad Eilis O'Hanlon never worked as a hack in Soviet Russia. Stalinist retouching would definitely have been her speciality.

It doesn't get any better. For her convenience, O'Hanlon continues to caricature the Minister's views, claiming that he holds 'a pathetic fragment of socialist dogma - the belief that to make value judgements about any work of creative impulse is bourgeois and unacceptable." Perhaps O'Hanlon encountered some socialist and/or trendy and/or feminist primitives with such views in her student days but wearily, I have to tell this fallible mind-reader that (A) they are not Michael D's views and (B) neither are they the views of the mainstream of leftist cultural thought.

Thereafter she praises the values of traditional education. "The education system," she writes, "should be there to provide a refuge from and an alternative to that dominant popular culture." Funny but my own school days taught me that an educational system that doesn't, however marginally, engage with the 'dominant popular culture' is liable to produce its own failures. If she read Bob Geldof's autobiography, she might understand my point.

But then Michael D. never suggested that we surrender and import MTV into Irish classrooms to the exclusion of W.B. Yeats, Daniel O'Connell and the latest maths. As I understand him, he was merely stating a commonplace: that a proper civics course requires clued-in media studies, which must engage contemporary popular culture which in turn includes film, video and music.

Shouldn't students learn how they can be manipulated by images and have some basic understanding of the commercial structure of the pop-culture industry. Does O'Hanlon really believe that, for example, a hour in an co-ed school examining and discussing the sexist imagery of heavy metal videos is A Bad Thing?

Of course like many in rock, I would be wary of the deadening hand of academic analysis. Still U2 do have their poetic connections. 'A Sort Of Homecoming' derives from Paul Celan's maxim that 'poetry is a sort of homecoming' while in the last two albums, Bono has paid tribute to both Charles Bukowski and Delmore Schwartz.

But I won't press the point for fear of being misunderstood and misrepresented by Eilis O'Hanlon. She may campaign for 'traditional education' but her own lack of basic logic and reading skills makes her no advertisement for it.

• BILL GRAHAM