That Maasai goodbye nearly broke my heart
The Hardest Harvest RTÉ One, Wednesday The Tonight Show TV3, Monday-Thursday The Ray D’Arcy Show RTÉ One, Saturday
The debate happens every year. When does Irish summer start? When I was a child, we were taught that May Day was the kick-off and that makes sense, because Midsummers Day is in the middle of June. Children nowadays apparently are taught that June, July and August are the summer months, but that is ridiculous because it places November in autumn, when frequently it’s the most wintry month of all, and February in winter, when as we all know, it’s the month that the first crocuses pop up to tell us it’s spring.
Anyway, I woke on Tuesday to the sound of heavy rain that never relented all day, and even lit the fire that night, then cursed when the rain returned on Wednesday too. Some start to summer, I grumbled, as I sat down to watch The Hardest Harvest on RTÉ One.
Halfway through, I vowed never to complain about rain again. The programme followed award-winning dairy farmer Paula Hynes as she travelled to Kenya to live with a Maasai family in their boma, or stockade, and help them look after their cattle.
I use the word ‘cattle’ loosely because, dear God, they literally looked like they had melted, their skin hanging over their bones like a threadbare throw on a sofa through which the springs had burst.
Even so, buyers and sellers haggled over price, though in many cases there seemed little likelihood the animals even would make it to whatever boma was to be their new home.
All of these experiences were filtered through Paula’s eyes, and she was an inspired choice to star, for want of a better word, in this programme. She was as warm, human and empathetic as they come, and funny too.
I laughed out loud when, kept awake by barking, she muttered under her breath: ‘F***in’ dog.’
Game for a challenge and willing to immerse herself fully in Maasai life, she even drank fresh blood drained from a goat. I was gagging watching it, so how she kept it down was beyond me.
My admiration for her was exceeded only by my admiration for the Maasai. Theirs is a simple life, but there seemed to be much joy in it, and the sort of multigenerational family structure that was once familiar here but now has fragmented.
Paula’s farewell to her new friends was deeply emotional. One of the younger men had good English and operated as Paula’s translator throughout. Their parting hug, when she called him ‘my brother’, almost broke me. I would love to see a follow-up up or, failing that, another programme with Paula at its heart. A television natural, she put many a professional to shame, because what she has on her side is authenticity, and you can’t fake that.
That, of course, doesn’t stop others from trying to sound authentic when they really couldn’t care less, and a lot of them turn up every week on The Tonight Show on TV3. It always was going to be difficult replacing Vincent Browne on the late shift, and it took Matt Cooper and Ivan Yates a while to bed down and perfect their good cop, bad cop routine. Now running like a welloiled machine, it had a particularly strong week this week, with much debate on Vicky Phelan’s exposure of the CervicalCheck scandal.
The best came on Wednesday, because the football ended at 10.30, opening up an extra half hour for
The Tonight Show. The 90 minutes bestowed the great benefit of space, with each of the contributors given time to talk their points through without interruption, and it’s a format the producers should consider retaining.
I would much rather see smaller panels with more time. We’re Irish, for heaven’s sake. We don’t do dead air, so let the people speak.
No one has spoken more eloquently this year than Vicky Phelan herself. On last Saturday’s Ray
D’Arcy Show, which aired too late to be included in this column, she was given space and time to tell her story without hurry or absent detail. At over 20 minutes, it was one of the longest segments I’ve seen on Ray D’Arcy’s show, and every second of it was riveting.
I suspect there were tears in every household watching, but not tears of sadness. I am seldom proud of others, because I find that weirdly territorial and patronising, but my eyes were stinging with tears of pride for Vicky and her fearlessness.