Schooled for success

TV REVIEW: The Boys of St Columb'sRTÉ1, Tuesday, Ireland's Crime CapitalsTV3, Monday Lorg LunnyTG4, Wednesday, One Born Every MinuteChannel 4, Tuesday, Hook in HaitiRTÉ 1 Monday

GIVE ME the boy after he is 11 and I will give you the Nobel laureate, the ambassador, the famous musician, the bishop, the government minister . . . St Columb’s boys school in Derry has a roll-call of alumni that would make those schools sitting smugly at the top of the annual league tables green with envy.

Seamus Heaney went there, as did John Hume, Seamus Deane, Paul Brady, Phil Coulter, Eamon Daly, the former bishop of Derry, James Sharkey, Ireland's youngest ambassador, and Eamonn McCann, journalist and social justice campaigner; these were The Boys of St Columb'sfeatured in the RTÉ documentary.

What they really had in common was an accident of opportunity. In 1947, a British Act of Parliament granted free secondary education to Northern Irish children for the first time; passing the 11-plus exam gave these seven schoolboys, from the impoverished Bogside or equally poor small farms, the chance to rise beyond the low expectations they had been born into. As John Hume remarked, if he had been born just a year earlier he would never had any education and what would have happened to him then?

Despite the playful cartoon graphics that (puzzlingly) interspersed the men’s reminiscences, this wasn’t a rosy Dead Poets Society view of the imposing- looking school – far from it. It was of its time, a tough place, ruled by the strap and, as McCann put it, the “bizarre and sadistic punishments” the teachers spent so much time thinking up. The boys emerged, as Deane put it, “hardened by school to prepare for the world beyond.”

The real story was how this generation of educated young Catholic men, particularly those ghetto boys from the Bogside, came to fully understand, articulate and then rebel against the corrupt social and political system that ruled their lives. They graduated from St Columb’s and went on to university; when they came back they were never going to accept being treated like second-class citizens.

The documentary lost it’s way a little as director Tom Collins delved into the CVs of its participants – surely none of these men need the ego massage of a career look-back – when a little more about the school and the education system of the time might have made more sense.

“Education is liberation,” said Daly; it’s the central message in the programme and a good one to cling on to now that the grinding points race is back.

ANOTHER KIND OFcompetition kicked off on TG4 on Wednesday with Donal Lunny embarking on a nationwide road-trip to find young musicians for a new band. Lorg Lunnyis no X-Factor, nor is it trying to be, and happily Lunny is no Simon Cowell. "It has to be different," he tells his old Bothy Band friends; one of the key differences will be a percussion instrument he is inventing for the band.

In the first programme he found his percussionist at a festival in Tullamore: Dermot from Clare who plays the bodhrán and the drums and who was treated to a masterclass with one of his heroes Noel Eccles. It was worth watching just to see the awestruck Clare man mentored with infinite patience by Eccles. Meanwhile, Lunny visited instrument-makers and craftspeople who he hoped would make his new type of drum. One to watch over the next eight weeks.

ANY HOMEGROWNpiece of investigative journalism deserves a look and when one is presented by Donal MacIntyre, billed by TV3 as is "one of Ireland's best-known investigative journalists" and promises to "study the continued presence of the IRA along the border", well, it's a case of shove up there on the sofa and, children, do not disturb.

The sensationalist title Ireland's Crime Capitalsshould have been the first hint that this was going to be a disappointment, but when MacIntyre introduced the first item, the murder of Paul Quinn in Armagh, "as the most brutal the Irish state has ever seen", any sensible person would have hit the "off" switch.

The script, either spoken to camera by MacIntyre as he manfully strode through various border towns or in voiceover, continued ratcheting up the hysteria while failing to deliver any new information or insights into any of the crimes it featured. There were interviews with victims and amateurish re-enactments – although MacIntyre was conspicuous by his absence in the interviews. He appeared more like a photogenic presenter-for-hire rather than a reporter using the investigative skills he built his career on. He did interview a Chinese couple who had been attacked in their restaurant in Clogherhead – not exactly a known crime capital. They showed their bruises and told McIntyre that known local thugs had attacked them. “Clogherhead, nice place to live, nice people,” said Wez Wang, shrugging philosophically, not quite realising she was supposed to hurl herself on the ground and rail against racist vigilantes if she was to stay on message, but it didn’t stop MacIntyre.

“Clogherhead isn’t the only place in Louth where people are getting their heads smashed in,” he burbled in a script that an American cable news channel anchorman would find too cheesy. In Dundalk, he said, “outlaws here have been causing an upsurge in stabbings recently.” That may be true but it was not backed up by any facts. As an investigative reporter, he should know that when it comes to crime, there’s no need to sensationalise.

WHAT IS REALLYsensational – and it's not for nothing that's it's one of the most enduring cliches – is the miracle of birth. Set in a busy British maternity hospital, One Born Every Minuteis a new fly-on-the-wall series (not the most hygienic image, but still) observing the everyday wonder of childbirth. Forty remotely operated cameras were dotted around the hospital – in the delivery suites, the operating theatres, the nurses station, everywhere – and were clearly unobtrusive because the labouring women didn't pay them a blind bit of attention. There's no voiceover either, which adds to the feeling of intimacy.

Programme one featured 37-year-old Tracy, who not only had brought her spectacularly useless husband into the labour room but their 18-year-old son. Maybe it was mum’s idea of a cunning masterclass in contraception but the mute son looked alternatively mortified, ill and a bit bored. He shifted sharpish, though, when the midwife – and to a woman they were all exceptional – asked him, at a crucial moment, to move away from the business end. Meanwhile the husband amused himself by trying on a stethoscope, tickling his pain-addled wife with a blown-up latex glove and attempting to lock her in the bathroom when she popped in, mid-contraction, for a pee.

The campaign to put men out of the labour ward and back pacing the corridor, celebratory cigar at the ready, starts here.

Before the quake: Rugby pundit mucks in to build houses for Haiti homeless

A popular public figure called George, recruited for his star quality and to muster up some publicity? Have no fear. This column is one of the few this weekend that is a Lee-free zone. It was rugby pundit and radio presenter George Hook who was called into service by the Haven charity to go to Haiti for a week with a group of 260 volunteers to build houses for the homeless. Filmed last October, before Haiti had really entered most of our consciousnesses or consciences, Hook in Haitiwas re-edited to include mention of the January earthquake.

The heat and the exhaustion clearly took it out of Hook – at 68 he said he never thought he’d be doing something like this – but he did his part with enthusiasm and not a little emotion. Unemployment in Haiti hovers around 70 per cent and that was before the earthquake, so the question why Irish volunteers, albeit wonderfully well-meaning and giving ones, are doing the work instead of hundreds of charity-paid locals backed up by a sustainable training programme niggled at the back of my mind throughout. Maybe they are, and Haven does that too, but it wasn’t clear.

Each of the volunteers raises €4,000; travel expenses aside, that amounts to the best part of €1 million to be spent in Haiti. Despite everyone’s obvious commitment and generosity, including George’s, the niggle didn’t go away.