One of the most moving TV moments of the year
Who Do You Think You Are? RTÉ One, Sunday Margaret: Rebel Royal BBC2, Tue The John Pauls RTÉ One, Monday Claire Byrne Live RTÉ One, Mon Late Late Show RTÉ One, Friday
Tragedy features prominently in the lives of Irish people. None of us has to look too far back to find a relative who died of tuberculosis, or who emigrated out of necessity rather than want, or who was abused. Singer Damien Dempsey discovered the full set in the first episode of a new series of RTÉ’s Who Do You Think You Are? and it made for one of the most moving hours of television you’ll see all year.
His aunt, Jenny Shanahan, fought with the Irish Citizen Army in Dublin Castle in the Easter Rising. In her thirties, she ended up a full-time carer for her elderly father and battled to get financial aid from the State – sound familiar? – in order to properly look after him. Before it was granted, she died at just 39, and a year later, her father finally received the money. The most harrowing story, though, concerned Damien’s grandfather Thomas Dempsey. Thomas was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, where two generations of his family worked in sweatshop conditions in a cotton mill. Things might have been bad in Ireland in the 19th century, but they were mirrored in the United States, where children as young as six were forced to work up to 12 hours a day too.
For reasons still unknown, Thomas’s mother, Maggie, a first-generation emigrant, left her husband and elder son in America and returned to Co. Mayo with Thomas, and this is where the story turned particularly ghastly. At the age of 14, Thomas was incarcerated in Letterfrack industrial school. His sin was that he was ‘found wandering’ and reported by a priest. It’s hard but to think that this was related in some way to his mother’s marital status. Nothing in rural Ireland was quite as terrifying to a priest as a single woman with a child, and you’d have to feel young Thomas was imprisoned as punishment.
In later life, he referred to Letterfrack as ‘Auschwitz’ and Dempsey found out why. A local historian told of the regular beatings, of a sexual predator active for over two decades, and of the singular cruelty of forcing boys with open wounds from back lashings to enter the salty sea. We all harbour a deep resentment for the sins of the past, but through Dempsey’s family, we heard a story that provoked a different reaction – absolute fury.
Fortunately, on Monday night, we found an antidote of sorts. The
John Pauls was a documentary about men who were so named after the papal visit in 1979. Now nudging 40, they proved to be a cross section of a new Ireland. One of them was called John Paul Twomey, so he won by having the full set – even the ‘two’ was in there. But it was a gay hairdresser for Cork, who showed just how completely this country has changed in the years since. Laughing, he told how his older clients assured him at the time of the marriage equality referendum that ‘I voted for you’, and he now is happily married. We have many faults as a nation, but it still is a lot more inclusive and welcoming to all its citizens than a rigidly conformist State that allowed a priest to send a boy to the gulags for ‘wandering’.
If constraints were placed on what the Irish could do, they were no less evident for the UK’s Princess Margaret. Second in line to the throne, she found herself without a clearly defined role beyond being cursed to live in the shadow of her sister, Queen Elizabeth, for her entire life. In the BBC’s fascinating documentary, The Rebel
Royal, she came across as a tragic figure. The love of her life was the divorced group captain Peter Townsend but she finally decided not to marry him, saying she believed ‘Christian marriage is indissoluble’. Bereft, she became something of a dilettante, and rather a good one at that, and ironically herself ended up divorcing her husband, Tony Armstrong Jones. If all three programmes told us anything, it was that you can fight life, but the only way to find true happiness is not to bow to the limits placed on you by society. Life is too short. Claire Byrne Live returned on Monday, and I rather hoped that this year, they would have learned from the mistakes of the last series and cut down on the number of topics covered to allow time for more meaningful discussion of just a few. Alas, it was as overstuffed as ever, a problem common to all television and radio panel discussions, and it ended up deeply unsatisfying. As I wrote here a few weeks ago, the great joy of Brendan O’Connor’s recent series was that an entire hour was dedicated to a single guest, allowing for a proper, in-depth insight into a fully rounded life. On Claire Byrne Live, athlete David Gillick was in studio to tell, in a matter of minutes, the story of his battle with depression, which left him with thoughts of suicide. There was so much more in the story, it felt frustrating to see it placed on what amounted to a conveyor belt of the day’s other news. Honestly, less really is more. This was proved on Friday night’s
Late Late Show when Ailbhe Griffith told the story of being sexually assaulted and later meeting her attacker in an act of restorative justice. Imagine the bravery it takes to meet a man who brutalised you. Imagine the strength needed to forge a life without being hostage to that savagery. Imagine the level of compassion required to see the humanity even in an abuser.
In a week when television was humbling, Ailbhe proved the most humbling of all.