RTE redeems itself with fine film on Sophie

SATURDAY in Skibbereen market is no place for souls seeking solitude. For locals and blow-ins, this is a meet-and-greet market, followed by the fast West Cork dismissal — “I’ll let you go so” — when you are sucked dry.

You might meet Jeremy Irons in a Savile Row suit or David Puttnam in lumberjack leather with braces. (I might have got that the wrong way around.)

Last Saturday, Ian Bailey, a regular fixture, accosted me with a book of poems.

Like most people, I am not panting to have books of verse pressed on me in broad daylight.

A poetic conservative, I find anything written after Philip Larkin and Paul Durcan a bit of a burden.

Also, I do not find Bailey as fascinating as some who are always attracted by the smell of sulphur.

Down the years, I met so many IRA types that I became immune to their dark incense.

So, like Yeats meeting the 1916 marchers, I said a few polite, meaningless words and moved on.

As always I was in two minds about Bailey. If he has truly nothing to hide, I am truly sorry for what happened to him.

But I am still bothered by Vincent Browne’s last, long interview with Bailey which was as soft as his chat with Leo Varadkar last week.

Not once could Bailey bring himself to use Sophie Toscan du Plantier’s full name.

In fairness, Browne stumbled over her name, too — part of a chronic problem he had with women’s names.

But the brief meeting with Bailey spurred me to watch Philip Boucher-Hayes’ RTE documentary on the Sophie story last Monday.

Also, I made sure to watch it on transmission because documentaries begin to date within hours and go on doing so.

Like fresh food they are best consumed on the spot, not reheated on playback.

First, however, I had to suppress my annoyance at Boucher-Hayes’ hyphenated name, a fashion I find pretentious.

Once I had jumped that Boucher’s Brook, I was rewarded by a peerless piece of pure reporting, sometimes reaching the level of tragic drama.

There is no higher praise I can give this film because reporting merely deals in malleable facts, whereas drama deals in deeper truth.

Political correctness prevents us admitting the story is also drama because the principal characters are so charismatic.

Furthermore, on film the three leading players — Sophie Toscan du Plantier, Jules Thomas and Ian Bailey — are physically striking.

Sophie Toscan du Plantier had a golden glow that spoke of a good woman in search of spiritual fulfilment.

Jules Thomas, Bailey’s loyal partner, has the same ravaged beauty of Charlotte Rampling, and the same suppressed passion.

The only time she dropped her guard was when Boucher-Hayes asked her flatly: “Do you love this man?” After a pause she replied: “Well I must do, mustn’t I?”

That syntax was as English as her name, as was her stoic support of a man who beat her badly on more than one occasion.

Bailey himself is so broodingly handsome he could have had a career as a Hollywood leading man.

No, I am not hinting he is acting when he denies anything to do with the death of Sophie Toscan Du Plantier.

Rather I am saying there is a rhetorical quality to how he presents himself, a touch of the ham actor.

He is always aware of himself being watched, alert to the camera angle.

But Pierre, Sophie’s son, forced us to face the fact that charisma cannot compete with character.

If Dee Forbes, RTE’s director-general, wants to make a case for more money, she should play that programme at the next Oireachtas hearing.

Because the bonus that Boucher-Hayes brought to this riveting story was superb sense of balance.

Balance does not mean concealing your point of view, but being fair. And this was a fair film.

***** Moving on through the market, I found a small table staffed by two Jehovah’s Witnesses.

As with “Northern unionists” let me help you put aside any prejudice “Jehovah’s Witnesses” might conjure by telling you I am talking about a tall man and a gentle woman.

What took my eye was a booklet, Ceard go direach a mhuineann an Biobla?

Translated that says, What exactly does the Bible teach? And the text inside was the limpid Irish of an educated native speaker.

The woman told me all translations were done by Witnesses, which means they have native speakers from the Connemara Gaeltacht.

But that’s not surprising. Historically, the western seaboard has been no stranger to supping with evangelists with fluent Irish.

This was before the Famine, too, and later slurs about “souperism”.

Let me stress I am not a Jehovah’s Witness, nor an apologist for their alarming views on blood transfusions.

But all religions have alarming views. Take the Roman Catholic Church or Islam’s warped view of women and sexuality.

What I respect about the Witnesses is their peerless record of resistance to Nazi Germany.

Betraying their own beliefs, most Protestant and Catholic Germans went along with Hitler’s pagan regime.

But the Witnesses said no. They refused to recognise the Reich in any form, right down to rejecting the Hitler salute.

In the concentration camps, the Witnesses were the bravest resisters, enduring torture and death with superhuman courage.

Himmler paid the Witnesses the supreme compliment, extolling their heroism as a model to be emulated by his SS elite.

Before I leave Skibbereen, a word of praise for the women of West Cork and their brisk way with flat batteries.

Last Sunday afternoon, I finished some shopping in Fields and I returned to my car in a hurry.

Still nursing the hurt of Cork’s failure in football, I was hoping to see Waterford put Wexford away, but wanted to do so at home rather than a bar with bawling kids driven mad by crisps and sugar.

Turning the key, a dead click told me the battery was as flat as the medieval notion of the earth.

So I dashed back to Fields and asked Pauline, the supervisor on duty, if there was a guy with jump leads working in the store.

From the checkout behind her a bright female voice said: “I have jump leads,” and I found myself gazing at a grinning young woman, enjoying my evident embarrassment.

Megan O’Donovan took only eight minutes to pull her car around to face mine, produce jump leads, attach them to the correct terminal — and this without any agonising over positive and negative terminals — tell me to turn my key and nod cheerfully as a loud roar revealed the job was done.

Megan O’Donovan. Even the name smacks of West Cork cool. She even might be related to the O’Donovan rowing clan. They should ask her for a jump-start.

***** A final rhetorical question, one of the many Vincent Browne failed to ask Leo Varadkar in his saccharine interview last Wednesday.

Will the Taoiseach bridle Simon Coveney, who is making a green mess of both Northern Ireland and Anglo Irish relations?

No. Afraid to take him on, the Taoiseach has backed his bluster on the Brits.

‘The RTE film was a peerless piece of pure reporting, reaching the level of tragic drama’