Remembering history is still a burning issue

Eilis O’Hanlon

THE continuity announcer certainly wasn’t underselling last Monday’s edition of The Archers. “Trust me,” he said, “your jaw will hit the floor.” To be honest, I’ve never been that fond of BBC Radio Four’s everyday story of rural folk, but who could resist a teaser like that? So I tuned in. It turned out that family matriarch, Jill has a new man in her life with the implausible name of Leonard Beret. Is that it? The character of Jill Archer has been a stalwart of the show for 60 years, but does it really justify astonishment that a woman of a certain age might have a new love interest, nine years after the death of her husband Phil?

The same station offered more drama, though of a very different sort, as Claire McGowan, the Co Down-born, Londonbased author of a bestselling series of crime novels, continued her six-part series Blackwater, about the shocking reappearance of a young woman 10 years after a local man was jailed for her murder.

Where has she been all this time? Whose body was it which was discovered back then? What seNcirgetl s la aLra e wthso e n vHililcaigeenrd s a oe f rcthiaims fictional NorthdersntrIurmishrev m illia n ge sth , iid l imngo?dia

Like The Arqcuhaetrus r ,e aauc t h fuegpiitsoatdu e rnonklykl lasts 15 minutes, but the short running time means there’s no room for slack; it’s tense, tautly written, gripping, and the only regret is that it’s being heard in six weekly instalments, rather than over the course of a single week, which would have made it even more of an event. The wait is cruel.

Charred Remains, this week’s Documentary On Newstalk, looked back at “the greatest act of destruction the State has ever seen” — the burning of the Public Records Office during the Civil War in June 1922. Six storeys high, above a basement, and all “packed from floor to ceiling” with invaluable records of Ireland’s past, the office was “at the centre of intellectual life”.

“We like to blame the British for a lot of things,” noted archivist and historian Catriona Crowe, “but it wasn’t the British who blew up the Four Courts in 1922, it was us.” Fragments of burnt paper were found as far afield as Howth.

Ordinary people brought in what they could find, but, Crowe went on to say, “nothing can fill the gap — ever.” Millions of documents were lost. It was, she said, “a terrible way to have become an independent State... by burning to the ground 800 years of Irish history.”

This, though, was also a story of redemption, celebrating the work of conservationists trying to recover the anWnaaltsc . h SoIm T e NObWooks survived in damaged forHmar , dp y eBrhucakp s s is woi n th thpeaRgTeE s Pfulasyee d r tuongtiel ther by Dheoc t e mbeet r a3 l, 0l;eratdei.ine g /ptla o ynerew dilemmas: do yoS u ix reNpaatio r ntshReu m gbt y o is geot n a3tPlwayhea r tu ’s ntiinl side, or preDseecrevm e bteh r e1 m 6; tav s 3.oieb/jpelcaty s erin their own right, wiS th imtph ly eiN r igpealr la tiic s uol n arBsBt C oriPiela s ye to r- teclulr?rently not

aCvahialarbrl ed toRveimewaeirn s s in wIare s latnhd e . work of Patricia Baker of independent production company Curious Broadcast, and presented all these issues with sprightly thoroughness. The hour flew by.

Finally, last Wednesday’s Last Word on Today FM marked the protest march on the Dail by Irish doctors by asking: “Why are GPs revolting?” Some puns never get old.