Oh yeah the death notices on the radio. I've never heard anything like that except in Ireland. I haven't thought of that in years.
I personally always found that so depressing. But I was very much out of sync there. Due to circumstances I ended up in rural Ireland for a while but I'm a very cosmopolitan person so that didn't work out at all. I need the world, big cities, things to explore. This kind of phenomenon was a reminder of the small size of the community I lived in which depressed me deeply :) I do understand it has value to local people who enjoy life that way.
As a country we have a bit of a fixation on death. During the pandemic, some studies and news sources started using rip.ie as an input, because, while formal death reporting outside hospitals in Ireland is lax (it's typically done by family if there are no unusual circumstances, can be done up to 12 months after death, and there are no real consequences for not doing it at all), people still get their death notices in the papers, so death notices were far less of a lagging indicator for covid mortality than formal death reports.
(Another way in which this system showed its cracks during the pandemic: presumably because of the flimsiness of the formal system, the CSO bases its population estimates on modelling. This lead to, at one point, the government reporting that 107% of the oldest age cohort had been vaccinated, because the CSO models significantly underestimated how many very old people were still alive.)
I personally always found that so depressing. But I was very much out of sync there. Due to circumstances I ended up in rural Ireland for a while but I'm a very cosmopolitan person so that didn't work out at all. I need the world, big cities, things to explore. This kind of phenomenon was a reminder of the small size of the community I lived in which depressed me deeply :) I do understand it has value to local people who enjoy life that way.
It was a very unique way of using radio though.