The Troubles in our DNA

TV REVIEW:
Voices from the GraveRTÉ1, Tuesday Horizon: Miracle Cure?BBC2, Monday True Stories: Bodysnatchers of New YorkMore4, Tuesday Reeling in the YearsRTÉ1, Sunday JFK: A HomecomingRTÉ1, Monday

THE TIMING of Voices from the Gravewas surely coincidental, but, in a week when there were plenty of horror movies and Halloween programmes with spooky names, this documentary about the Troubles was the real spine-chilling deal.

In 2001, as a part of an oral-history project now lodged with Boston College, two former terrorists – leading activists on either side of the divide – recorded their perspective on their activities during the Troubles. The condition was that the tapes would not be made public until after their deaths, but, as it turned out, both the former IRA leader Brendan Hughes and the UVF bomber turned PUP politician David Ervine died comparatively young, permitting Ed Moloney to write a book including details from the tapes.

This extraordinary and compelling documentary by Patrick Farrelly is based both on the tapes and on Moloney’s book. Using archive footage, interviews with friends and family of Hughes and Ervine, and superb dramatic reconstruction (particularly Hughes’s daring escape from the Maze), it told the story of several key events from the late 1960s to the start of the peace process. The key to its power was eerie eyewitness testimony of the dead men talking.

One of the most controversial sections is when Hughes discusses the “disappearance” of Jean McConville. As a finger pushed a button on the tape recorder we heard the clear, rational voice of Hughes, former IRA director of operations, explaining why McConville, an impoverished Belfast widow and a mother of 10, “deserved to be executed”.

She had, he said, been given one warning when the IRA suspected she was a police informer; when it thought she was still informing, “the special squad was brought into the operation then, ‘the Unknowns’. You know, when anyone needed to be taken away, they normally done it. I had no control over this squad. Gerry had control over this particular squad”.

Hearing the casual description of such brutality was chilling. The “Gerry” repeatedly talked about by Hughes was Gerry Adams MP, whose publicly stated position is that he has never been a member of the IRA, although he was clearly a close friend of Hughes in the 1970s and 1980s – or, as one contributor said, “Brendan’s family was the IRA and his brother was Gerry Adams.”

The film-maker’s treatment of the McConville episode is typical of his careful storytelling approach and his ability to create dramatic tension without a hint of sensationalism. We saw the tape being played; saw desperately sad archive footage of the McConville children making a televised plea for their mother to come home; grainy black-and-white photos of McConville looking worn out and older than her years; and then an interview with the former police ombudsman Nuala O’Loan, who said that to her certain knowledge McConville was never an informer.

Hughes ended up a broken, bitter man, feeling betrayed by the direction Adams took and the failure of the IRA to achieve its goals. For Ervine “the most fundamental issue for the UVF was a single issue, the principle of consent. The UVF got what it wanted.”

Whether a dead man’s version of history is more truthful because he has nothing to lose is open to debate, but Farrelly has done what I didn’t think possible: he made a programme about the Troubles that was also a riveting piece of TV.

TEN YEARS AGOscientists announced that they had mapped the billions of letters in our DNA and created a draft of the human genome. It was hoped that this great scientific achievement – the greatest of our time – would usher in a new age of medicine, particularly in the treatment of genetic conditions. Put at its simplest, if the gene responsible could be isolated, then gene therapy could replace that faulty gene with a fully working one.

Horizon: Miracle Cure?set out to discover if, a decade later, the dream of miracle cures has become a reality. The programme took the inspired decision to send out three reporters with a vested interested in the results: Sophie, who has cystic fibrosis; Emma, who carries the gene for breast cancer; and Tom, a recovering alcoholic. It made for a very personal programme, with the science conveyed in non-boffin language and with an urgency that is usually missing from academic investigations.

At 23, Sophie, a gorgeous, athletic teacher, knows that her time could be running out, as the life expectancy of someone with CF in the UK is 38. She learned that just four letters are wrong in her CFTR genome – that’s four out of 3.2 billion – and the genetic blip is why she has cystic fibrosis.

“If you could fix that, you would – any parent would,” she said as she lay on her bed, gasping for air, after one of her many daily physiotherapy sessions.

As she toured the labs and saw the amazing work being done, particularly at the CF Centre Therapy Consortium in London, she became more and more hopeful. She saw that gene therapy is working in some other genetic conditions, but CF is proving difficult, though it is hoped that a major clinical trial will yield results.

“When?” asked Sophie. She was told it will be finished in 2012, and then, if it goes well, maybe treatment will be available four or five years after that. You could see her doing the maths, and her face clouded.

THE MEDICAL WORLDshown in Horizonwas a brave, shiny new one full of hope and passionate doctors and scientists, while the one exposed in True Stories: Bodysnatchers of New Yorkwas grubby, greedy and ghoulish. This fascinating documentary told the story of a dental surgeon named Michael Mastromarino, here interviewed in jail, who was convicted in 2008 of running a business where he first harvested the body parts of corpses – with the complicity of some of the funeral homes but without the agreement of relatives – and then sold them on for transplant. A body, he said, was worth $200,000 once you added up all the bits; he and his accomplices got their hands on at least 1,000 bodies.

He traded for four years in and around New Jersey, and his fake paperwork meant that the buyers of the body parts – three stock-exchange-listed medical companies – had no idea if the parts were contaminated with any number of life-threatening conditions or even how old the pieces were. One woman who had pieces of cadaver inserted in her spine to mend a disc (who knew that was even possible?) now finds herself with hepatitis B.

The deception came to light only when a new owner bought into a funeral parlour and noticed that there were some strange goings-on in a room upstairs; she took her suspicions to the cops. The slick district attorney, who looked straight out of a Hollywood drama, didn’t quite believe that such a crime could exist until a body was exhumed and he saw the PVC plumbing pipes that the modern-day grave robbers had used as replacements for bones in the corpses, to conceal their crime.

The great journalist and broadcaster Alistair Cooke was one of the victims – though, as his daughter pointed out, he was 95 and had bone cancer, so whatever about anything else, surely he wasn’t that suitable a donor.

Thinking about what had happened to her father, she said, with creative understatement: “It sure lights a fire under your imagination.”

Still reeling: No joy in noughties nostalgia, but home comfort from JFK

It's way too soon for the new batch of Reeling in the Years. Looking at the clips of the grinning faces of Charlie McCreevy and Bertie Ahern at the start of the decade doesn't induce the warm, fuzzy nostalgia that came with the previous series and made them so popular. So much of this noughties look-back just reminds us yet again how much of a mess our elected limo-loving classes made of the country during the first decade of the new century.

Nostalgia was the mood of Ryan Tubridy's workmanlike documentary JFK: A Homecoming, which told an already familiar story. His central thesis seems to be that John F Kennedy arrived for his 1963 visit a reluctant Irishman (as wealthy New Englanders, the Kennedys identified with Britain more than with bog-trotting Ireland, and his father, Joe, hated being reminded of his Irish roots), and he left, after four days of being love-bombed and revered, a proud Irishman.

The archive footage was fascinating and moving, but the timing of this history documentary – not the usual bank-holiday viewing, not an anniversary of the visit, no new revelations – was peculiar until you noted that RTÉ’s star presenter has a book coming out this week about the JFK visit. Nice publicity if you can get it.