How Maurice McCabe exposed corruption… and the huge toll it took on him and his family
They Shall Not Grow Old BBC2, Sunday Whistleblower RTÉ One, Mon/Tue Dynasties BBC1, Sunday Nolan Byrne Live RTÉ One, Monday
For all our lives, we have viewed the First Word War as a black-and-white conflict, literally and metaphorically. Metaphorically, in that it clearly was all about warring cousins, kings, kaisers and tsars, bringing their empire-building battles a little closer to home. Literally, because all the film footage we’ve ever seen shows a monochrome and mute world inhabited by jerky stick figures, facilitating a sort of detachment that has made it feel more a curiosity than carnage.
They Shall Not Grow Old completely upended that notion. Directed by Peter Jackson of Lord Of The Rings fame, the four-year project gathered footage from the collection in the Imperial War Museum. The frame rate was digitally adjusted up to make actions look more fluid. Lip readers were employed to find out what soldiers in the clips were saying (though pretty much anyone probably made out one cheery chap off to war saying ‘Hello, Mum!’) and these were then dubbed in by actors. And, finally, the footage was colourised. Indeed, the moment it went from black and white into colour was absolutely jaw-dropping, and what followed was like seeing the war for the first time.
Commentary came in the form of eyewitness accounts recorded by the BBC in the 1960s, which alternated between the mundane and funny (stories of soldiers falling into latrines, or visiting brothels) and the utterly chilling, as one soldier told how, seeing a colleague severely wounded and begging for release, he shot the man dead to end his suffering.
What was even sadder was the fact that the soldiers interviewed bore no animosity to their German opponents, who they realised were ordinary men just as they were, fighting futile proxy battles for monarchs whose own lives never were under threat.
The end credits were overdubbed with the song Mademoiselle From
Armentières, and it made the entire programme poignant beyond words for me, because that’s where my great-grandfather James Kavanagh, a private in the Leicester Regiment, died on June 8, 1915. Naturally, all the photos I have of him also are in black and white, but
They Shall Not Grow Old reminded me that he too lived in a world just as colourful as ours, even though his end sucked much of the colour from the lives of those left behind.
More black than white was the experience of Garda whistleblower Maurice McCabe, brilliantly detailed in Katie Hannon’s two-part documentary on RTÉ One.
The retired sergeant told his own story, and what a story it was. After raising concerns about standards in his station in Bailieborough, he not only was ostracised by his fellow officers, but subjected to baseless allegations that he was a paedophile – a claim repeated by the then commissioner Martin Callinan to Oireachtas Public Accounts Committee chairman John McGuinness TD during a secret meeting in a Dublin car park.
There are many who think that the greatest calumny inflicted on Maurice McCabe was the open hostility of his colleagues, but the saddest thing for me was the fact he no longer felt he even could bathe his own children, and excused himself from his own house when friends called with their children. How bleak it must have felt to be unable to do the simple tasks all fathers relish in case any false allegations of impropriety gained traction or currency. The State owes a great deal to Maurice McCabe for exposing corruption within the Force, but also to his wife Lorraine. Steely without being even remotely brittle, she came across as an absolute rock.
Surely no-one wishes the McCabes anything but the happiest of retirements, and hopefully with a shedload of cash. It never will undo the hurt, but if it helps them make happy memories to replace the nightmares, who could begrudge them?
The most soothing sound on TV, the voice of David Attenborough, returned to BBC1 on Sunday night in Dynasties, which looks at hierarchies in the animal kingdom.
First up was a family of chimpanzees in Senegal, where alpha male David was under threat from younger rivals. They didn’t mess around, because a group of them attacked David and left him for dead. In a response that surely had the middle-aged everywhere cheering, David pulled himself together, challenged the main usurper, and reinstated himself at the top of the tree, literally.
It all was filmed as beautifully as we have come to expect but am I alone in feeling that we’ve seen a lot of this before? The trouble with Attenborough’s work is that he has charted nature in all its raw beauty and cruelty so many times before, animal fatigue is starting to set in. By the end, I just wished the chimps would surprise us all, set up a table, sit down for a brew and talk it out. It almost came to that on Nolan
Byrne Live, an entertaining hookup between BBC Northern Ireland and RTÉ to discuss Brexit. The Beeb’s Stephen Nolan came to Dublin and Claire Byrne went to Belfast, and it very much was a game of two halves.
Nolan ran his side of the debate like a day in the wild, while Byrne very much was of the cuppa-andchat school of civilised debate. The standout guest, for all the wrong reasons, was fringe unionist Jim Allister – as Twitter user David Clohessy pointed out, impressive technology surely was used to beam him into the studio live from 1690. There wasn’t much in the way of illumination but it was a useful experiment and more cooperation between the broadcasters on the island would be welcome – though exposure to the likes of Allister would make even the most enthusiastic nationalist think twice about reunification.
Whistleblower Saddest thing was he no longer felt he could bathe his own children