No justice or peace but bravery beyond belief
Land Without God RTÉ One, Thursday
The Unbelievable Story Of Carl Beech BBC2, Monday
Concert4Cancer Virgin Media One, Friday
Dáithí’s Decade Of The Roses RTÉ One, Monday
The Republican National Convention CNN, Monday to Thursday
Mannix Flynn was six when he first appeared in the children’s court. At 10, he was sent to Letterfrack industrial school, accompanied on the train from Dublin to Galway by a garda and handed over to a Christian Brother. On the way, the brother pulled the car into a forest and orally raped the boy. It was a brutal introduction to a new life, if you could call it that, because Letterfrack was a notorious prison for children.
Mannix, now a playwright, author and Dublin city councillor, came from a large family and many of them, boys and girls alike, spent time in institutions as children and as adults. He told their story in
Land Without God, a quietly devastating documentary aired by RTÉ on Thursday night. There was poetry in the telling of it, but pretty brutal prose in the detail. One of Mannix’s nephews concluded that his own family, between them, had served over 100 years in industrial schools or in prison; another brother listed off the prisons he had been locked up in over the course of his life.
At no stage did it seem to occur to anyone in authority that the Flynns were a family that needed intervention and help. None of their sentences seemed to be designed to help them break the cycle, but instead only to punish them. The Jesuits like to say that if you give them the boy, they’ll give you the man, yet the Christian Brothers in the industrial schools took a different view: give us the boy and we will abuse him, brutalise him, and leave him scarred for life. It is sometimes hard to be shocked anymore by details of these crimes, but Mannix Flynn managed it by delivering it all with quiet calm rather than the fury I vicariously felt. The fact that testimony of survivors to the Ryan report is now locked away for 75 years is a national scandal and the ultimate irony – the abusers have better protection than the abused.
The flipside of this, sadly, was shown in The Unbelievable Story Of Carl Beech on BBC2. Beech was the fantasist known as ‘Nick’ who somehow convinced British police that he had, as a boy, been abused by a paedophile ring that included former British prime minister Edward Heath, former minister Leon Brittan, and other senior political and military figures. Their investigation was shambolic. Beech said he was regularly taken from school even though records showed full attendance. He claimed his abusers physically harmed him in a way that surely would have left scars, but he had none.
They never interviewed his exwife, who could have told them in an instant that the only claim she partially believed was that he might have been abused by his stepfather, though Beech’s own family flatly rebutted the claim.
This all emerged after the Jimmy Savile scandal, and Beech basically was a grifter who thought he would get compensation for his outrageous claims. Only when the police finally realised what they were dealing with did they investigate Beech himself, and found sickening images of the rape and abuse of children on his laptop, a crime for which he is now serving 18 years. The really sad part of the story, though, is that Beech’s lies will have made police forces wary of others who come forward with genuine tales of abuse, a grave disservice to all who seek justice for historical crimes.
I didn’t expect a lot of the Concert4Cancer in aid of the Marie Keating Foundation, but it turned out to be a triumph for Virgin Media One and, hopefully, for the cancer charity too. My late mother was a 31-year cancer survivor and died of something unrelated, so I know how important it is to get early diagnosis and care. Like all charities, the foundation was unable to hold its traditional fundraisers this year, and hopefully the concert made up for it. With terrific performances from The Coronas, Kodaline, Nathan Carter, Johnny McEvoy (oh, how that brought me back to day trips in the car as we all sang Mursheen Durkin when we were kids!), and personal messages from the likes of Kylie Minogue, who survived breast cancer herself, it was hugely uplifting. The highlights for me were Gary Barlow singing Back For Good, well up there with the best pop songs of the Nineties, and a spectacular performance of Riverdance outside Slane Castle at sunset. Unusually for a fundraiser, it proved also to be quite brilliant entertainment.
So too was Dáithí’s Decade Of The Roses, a look back at his tenure in the Tralee Dome over the course of the last 10 years. We revisited that excruciating live marriage proposal, and saw footage of the subsequent wedding; learned that two of the women who appeared in the contest have sadly died in the meantime; and, naturally, were treated to another viewing of Dublin Rose Siobhéal Nic Eochaidh’s now legendary hiphop dance, in which she looked like she plugged herself into the national grid and used every last volt of energy.
If that was fun, the darkest viewing of the week came in the Republican National Convention. I stayed up until almost 5am two nights this week to watch it, and I really wish I hadn’t. Deprived of the chance to run on the promise of a booming economy, Donald Trump has doubled down on division, portraying peaceful protesters as anarchists, and smearing Joe Biden as the radical left. Biden has said there will be no tax increases for anyone earning up to $400,000. Radical left? He’s further to the right than Fine Gael, for heaven’s sake.