Peter Costello
World of Books
We may be about to see major changes in the way the major books shops in Ireland – mostly now the property of British companies – are run. Quite how all of this will work out for readers anxious to stay in touch, not just with Britain, as these companies imagine, but with Europe itself post-Brexit, is not clear.
Already there is an easing-out of the foreign language newspapers and journals. Figaro went some years ago, Le Monde seems under threat – as are the Italian, German, and Spanish papers.
Le Nouvel Observateur, published in Paris, the largest selling news magazine in France, was dropped by Easons a few weeks ago – its shelf space is now taken, surprisingly enough, by Gay News – published in Britain.
While I am all for serving the perceived needs of minorities as a good thing, it seems that those who wish to read European papers and books are, it now seems, a minority too.
Easons remains an Irish company (so far). Though one which like W. H. Smith in Britain, has a preference for the meritorious and popular (such as adult colouring books and those silly Enid Blyton and Ladybird pastiches) which boomed for a short season and then lost 50% of their sales. (Smith’s it seems now makes more money out of it travel and tourism business that from books.)
But Waterstone’s in the UK are pursuing a trend towards making their shops seem more like independent stores rather than all part of a chain. However, the tale is still told about how their head office, then in Leeds, contacted the Dublin shop to say they should reduce or give up selling books in Gaelic – figures showed these simply did not sell.
It had to be explained that in Dublin (where both schools and universities all taught and studied Gaelic) they were a major retailer in the section. One fears more of this kind of cultural blindness arising from English perceptions in post-Brexit times.
The same problem, by the way, arises with the Sky TV channel. When we got the service installed at home I asked whether it got “foreign channels”. Only later did I realise I asked the salesman the wrong question. Like the foolish person I am, I meant by “foreign channels” channels such ARTE, Deutsche Welle, RAI and so.
“Oh, yes,” I was assured, “there there are plenty of foreign channels.” And so there are, in one sense. Sky carries stations from India, Pakistani, Bangladesh, Nigeria and such of Commonwealth communities, with large populations in Britain.
But Europe was limited largely to TV5 Monde.
I felt cheated, as we so often are these days when the internet lets us down, there is little an individual can do. The staff rarely pass on complaints to the right level, and top management are not really interested. One suspects they see little difference between Ireland and the UK – Éire is, so to speak, just another province.
When I suggested to the staff that this was poor planning for post-Brexit arrangements for an Ireland which would remain in the EU, he admitted this was the case. But it seems to be no-one’s job to think about it.
So many of our books and other related cultural goods come from Britain that there ought to be wider concern that the post-Brexit studies of ‘Little England, Right or Wrong’ will spill over here. As a strongly pro-European nation we are far too heavily influenced by Anglo-American culture, with its sharp divides and raucous styles of cultural debate.
Irish Catholics in particular are more like to be influenced by America than they are by France or Germany. This cannot be a healthy thing for our own cultural values going forward. We have to realise that EWTN is not the final word in Catholic broadcasting, far from it. Our needs are best served by the widest range of European books, magazines, journals and television.