The book of revelations

TV REVIEW:WHO ARE WE, where have we come from, and where in the name of God are we going? Maybe it's the yellowing sky outside my window, threatening thunder and teasing with occasional splashy rain, but there seems to be a nervy unpredictability and a demand for some deadly serious reckoning in the air.

Nightly News With Vincent Browne TV3, weekday evenings

Questions and Answers RTÉ1, Monday

Prime Time RTÉ1, Tuesday

The Meaning of Life With Gay Byrne RTE1, Sunday

Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor: The Link BBC1, Tuesday

The Operation: Surgery Live Channel 4, weekday evenings

With the publication of the Ryan commission’s report, the lid has finally been lifted on Pandora’s putrid box, and all the horrors of the industrial schools and religious institutions to which this State committed her impoverished and vulnerable young now seem to be screeching about us like wailing ghosts.

There have been some memorable television contributions on the issue. In particular, Nightly News with Vincent Browne has remained dogged in its interrogation of various uncomfortable-looking Government spokespeople and in its reporting of the horrifying revelations, including a searing contribution from former Goldenbridge resident Christine Buckley. Buckley, who was incarcerated in the Inchicore orphanage at just three years of age (her mistake, written on her committal papers, was that she had been “found wandering”), made the chilling point that the judiciary had committed babies to Goldenbridge. Her descriptions of tots tied to pots until their rectums collapsed, and of infants being held upside-down and beaten for crying, almost defy understanding. Indeed Buckley, in conversation with Browne, observed that were she, and others like her, to reveal their memories fully, the personal cost would be unbearable. “I don’t think I would ever recover, and the public wouldn’t stomach it,” she said.

But the public can and must stomach it. Buckley's valiant personal contribution was echoed on Questions and Answersby Michael O'Brien, a former Fianna Fáil councillor and mayor of Clonmel, who vociferously, and with enormous impact, argued for constitutional change to enable the State to freeze the assets of various religious orders in order to compensate their victims. In the 1940s, O'Brien was one of eight siblings (one sister was just months old) who were taken from the family home by the "cruelty man" and incarcerated. O'Brien himself was a resident of St Joseph's Industrial School in Clonmel, run by the Rosminian order, where he was sexually and physically abused.

O’Brien’s testimony was savage, and his brutally honest description of how, as a small, bewildered child, he was raped just two days after his committal to an institution, was desperately poignant. His rage annihilated a shilly-shallying Noel Dempsey, who sat on the panel like a sacrificial lamb. Their confrontation (if that’s what it can be called, considering that Dempsey had all the fight of a used tea-bag) made unforgettable television. O’Brien, a lifelong Fianna Fáiler, a big, sound man in shirt and tie whom you could picture whooping it up at the Ard Feiseanna and rattling the garden gates as he canvassed the electorate, described turning from the party in despair over its procrastination.

He told Dempsey, in simple, fierce language, how he had been raped, buggered and beaten from head to toe on a Saturday, and how the hand of that same guilty perpetrator would give him Communion on a Sunday. He went on, with coruscating openness, to explain how he had felt suicidal after five days of barracking from clerical lawyers when he had recounted his story to the Ryan commission. This former stalwart of the party concluded by telling the now stricken-looking Dempsey that, to this day, he wakes up sweating and leaps from his bed, with the ghost of the Rosminian father beckoning him.

Watching these two men, one felt dumbfounded by the apparent impotence of the current administration, its inability to call the religious orders to book.

Prime Timeshould have been prescribed viewing for Dempsey, including as it did a briskly incisive report from Mike Milotte on how the assets of the Christian Brothers (which include property in Canada and Rome) have been largely tied up in the newly formed Edmund Rice Trust. The report also contained a little nugget of advice for the Government on dealing with the religious orders should it find itself attempting to divest them of their property. The advice was courtesy of Fr Tom Doyle, a Washington-based canon-law expert and victims' advocate. "Don't trust anything they say, and follow up requests with a power greater than themselves," was his uncompromising recommendation.

SO, FROM THE abominable to the abstruse. Gay Byrne’s successful short series, The Meaning of Life, drew to a close this week with a conversation between Byrne and writer and film-maker Neil Jordan. Jordan comes across as a taciturn sort of chap, not unfriendly but perhaps a little bemused by the tone of Byrne’s questions, which (though maybe this is just my bruised imagination) seemed somewhat more insistent than usual. Now it can’t be easy, attempting to pin people down on their notions of spirituality or godliness, and one couldn’t blame Byrne if he was beginning to tire of his guest’s idea of God being a cross between a glistening tea-light and a successful spell in rehab.

“But what would you say to God if you did meet him?” he asked Jordan (twice). Jordan, who seemed more than a little sceptical about that possible encounter, if not downright nonplussed, eventually offered as a possible ice-breaker: “I have no language with which to address you, you know?” Which is, you know, fair enough.

Basically, however, Byrne’s last catch was a slippery fish. Jordan wasn’t ruling anything out and he wasn’t ruling anything in, though he did tell an interesting, unresolved story of flying home to Dublin from Los Angeles, and waking in the middle of heavy turbulence to see his deceased father (who had been a great believer in an afterlife) standing in the aisle in his cardigan, looking a little lost. Having grown up with a mother who saw so many ghosts she might as well have been a character in a magic-realist novel, this story resonated with me somewhat.

I was thinking, though, that, given the current global downturn for the airline industry, Jordan should have been damned grateful that his forlorn pater wasn’t charged for failing to print out his own boarding card.

THE BYZANTINE complexity of life, which was demonstrated across the channels in all its glory and ignominy this unsteady week, also included a whispered offering from Sir David Attenborough. Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor: The Linkwas probably fascinating, but I'm afraid I slept through most of it, for entirely entomological reasons (I had been bitten by some nefarious insect, my leg looked like a jam roly-poly and the medication's prediction of drowsiness was spot-on).

However, I did stay awake long enough to learn that the fossilised remains of a 47-million-year-old ancestor have been discovered in Germany’s Messel pit. Now named Ida, after the daughter of the Norwegian scientist into whose possession she finally fell (having previously been the property of a megalomaniacal collector), this little monkey-like girly, who is now being touted as the “missing link”, looks a little like Victoria Beckham but has a rather long tail instead of a pair of crippling Manolos.

Interestingly, Ida turned up with the contents of her tiny stomach still intact, a wholesome blend of fruit, seeds and leaves (similar, probably, to the diet of Mrs Beckham). Pre-ethnic, pre-Christian, pre-celebrity, and really, really skinny, Ida might just do as a pin-up for these new, more austere times.

[ tvreview@irishtimes.com ]

Up close and visceral Knowing what viewers want - it really is brain-surgery

Apparently, Channel 4 consulted a focus group to come up with ideas for what people wanted to watch on their tellies and, mind-shattering as it may sound, was told that there is a penchant out there, in the powdery suburbs and damp countryside, for viewing surgery, live. The result is the aptly named The Operation: Surgery Live, which ran over four nights this week with a studio audience, under the baton of Krishnan Guru-Murthy, pitching anodyne questions, via a live link-up, at various masked surgeons who were in the middle of post-watershed operations to jolly along the channel's ratings and save a life or two.

I watched (with my eyes closed) the brain-surgery one, during which a pleasant chap had bits of his cranium removed and a gloopy tumour sucked from the recesses of his head. He was awake throughout the process, being encouraged to chat with the anaesthetist and to exchange a few pleasantries with the jaded studio onlookers. “Does it hurt?” asked some genius, via Twitter. Oh no, it’s a laugh a minute! Of course it bloody hurts – that’s the top of his head sitting on that trolley.