TV Review: Dispiriting, rain-splattered housing estates were the setting for another powerful programme from the award-winning Prime Time Investigates, in which reporter Ken O'Shea spoke to shattered victims and pixelated perpetrators about the growing and insidious problem of anti-social behaviour.
"Maybe they should have done something for us when we were younger," said one of those perpetrators, himself the victim of a vigilante attack, who questioned where politicians and councillors were when these insufficiently resourced estates were being built, estates that are now being referred to as war zones.
O'Shea was at pains to point out that it is often no more than 10 or 15 teenagers on a single estate who try to impose mob law, the majority of residents being law-abiding citizens. But for targeted families whose homes and property are vandalised, who are threatened with rape and death, it is often the absence of support from neighbours (probably due to fear of reprisals) that eventually breaks their spirit, forcing them to abandon their homes.
One victim, Palestinian Jason Bishop, was so brutally beaten (having gone to the assistance of a neighbour who was being intimidated on her doorstep) that he spent a week in a coma. The brutal attack took place in Mulhuddart in Dublin. Bishop recalled the perpetrators calling him a "f***ing Paki" and focusing their kicks on his eyes and kidneys. His wife, who was seven months pregnant, witnessed the assault. "Daddy has just fallen," she lied to their terrified children.
On the inaptly named John Paul Estate in Kilrush, Co Clare, Fianna Fáil councillor Stephen O'Gorman continues to speak out against drug dealing and intimidation. He keeps detailed accounts of cars "acided", of windows smashed, of boarded-up and neglected houses as families move away, unwilling to wait out the 10 years on the transfer list. O'Gorman has paid a high price for his courage: his daughter and her friend were attacked and beaten around the face with iron bars, and most recently shots were fired from a double-barrelled shotgun into his home.
Prime Time is adept at setting the political agenda, and as the Government shuffles its electioneering deck, we were told that a "raft" of new laws, including anti-social behaviour orders (Asbos), are being considered.
From the estates came a familiar wish-list from voices that have been crying into the wind for too long: higher levels of community policing, resource centres, youth clubs, sports facilities. Now that anti-social behaviour is no longer simply an issue for council estates and is emerging as a classless phenomenon, maybe those voices will finally be heard.
ANOTHER KIND OF anti-social (or maybe that should be over-social) behaviour was on our screens this week. The "gold-plated floozie" was at it again: we'd already had the documentary (Princess Margaret, royal raver, or something equally grim) and then, just when you thought it was safe to untangle your back-comb, up popped the strangely watchable yet deeply annoying biopic, The Queen's Sister. In a nutshell: tantrums, Townsend, misspent tax money and a lot of sex in the bathroom (in the course of two hours we witnessed Mags fornicating lavishly in showers, baths and toilets).
All this was interspersed with odd little photographic vignettes of the British public's changing attitude to the monarchy and royals playing hide-and-seek with the paparazzi, which added up to a rather exhausting evening.
Lucy Cohu played Margaret, and she was a hell of a lot more likable than her subject. Brighter, prettier and more sympathetic, she was less believable when she had to rehash lines from one of Princess Margaret's unauthorised biographies. At one point Margaret, angry and hurt (her husband was having an affair), arrived unexpectedly at a performance of Hello Dolly, entered a freshly vacated royal box and stood waiting for applause from the first-night audience. When they ignored her, she waited and waited until eventually there was sporadic applause from the auditorium, the cast was dragged on stage to curtsey, and a tremulous princess took her seat. "They have to learn," she muttered to her lady in waiting. "My God, they might as well be Africans."
Margaret's life, one imagines, her savage snobbery and vacuous hedonism, was stranger than any semi-fictionalised account could dare to be. Now that we've done the orgiastic house parties in the country and the drunken soirées in Kensington, now that we've witnessed her bedding the baby-faced Roddy Llewellyn in a watery commune and heard her sinister conversations with the reptilian Prince Philip ("We will look after your interests, even aggressively, when you lack judgment"), it is surely time to let the bucolic old party girl rest in peace.
'IT IS NOT to those who can inflict most but to those who can endure most that victory is certain." Mahatma Gandhi, according to Máire MacSwiney Brugha, daughter of Terence MacSwiney, was said to be greatly influenced in his dealings with the British Empire by the writings, actions and thinking of her father.
MacSwiney, the lord mayor of Cork, died in Brixton Prison after 73 days on hunger strike, his death (and that of his predecessor, Tomás McCurtain) heralding a savage period in Ireland's struggle for independence.
Hidden History: The Burning of Cork was a moving account of the events leading up to the appalling night of December 11th 1920, when the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries took revenge on Cork after the Kilmichael and Dillon's Cross ambushes, and so devastated the city that one of their number compared the scale of the mayhem to what he had seen in Flanders. Conal Creedon's meticulously researched film further enhanced a fascinating historic strand, using poignant archive, an original soundtrack by Niall O'Sullivan and lucid, resonant interviews, particularly with historians Pat Poland and Dónal Ó Drisceoil.
The emotion, of course, lay in the details of familial memory. Among those interviewed was the niece of Con and Jerry Delaney, who told of her aunt holding a cross to her brothers' dying lips after they had been taken out of their beds at 2am and shot by the Black and Tans. The granddaughter of McCurtain, meanwhile, told of her grandmother, pregnant with twins, holding her husband as he lay dying in the hallway of his home, he too having been shot as he prepared for bed.
One of the archive clips showed a tram gaily sailing down Pana (St Patrick's Street) prior to its being set ablaze, with an advertisement for the City of Cork Steam Packet Company emblazoned on its livery. It's hard to imagine Irish Ferries illuminating the side of the Luas with the same optimism or pride. Later that evening, members of the panel on Questions and Answers had steam coming out of their noses when Dan McLaughlin, Bank of Ireland chief economist, attempted to defend Irish Ferries' position in purely economic terms. Accused of having a distant relationship with humanity, the implacable and well-heeled McLaughlin merely blinked.
A DISTANT RELATIONSHIP with society was explored in One Life: the Naked Rambler, in which film-maker Richard Macer followed "naturist rambler" Steve Gough and his girlfriend, Mel, as they attempted to walk naked from Land's End to John O'Groats. Macer, an interested but perplexed observer, tried to find out what had motivated the hirsute Gough and hairdresser Mel to abandon their clobber and negotiate electric fences, funeral parties, supermarkets, police vans and publicans in the altogether.
Why walk around Safeway wearing only a pair of hiking boots and a rucksack? Why descend on an upmarket hotel and order a pint and a sandwich wearing only a sun hat? Gough, having been arrested, incarcerated and released, having eschewed Mel's assumption of fidelity by sleeping with another of his naturist girlfriends en route (Mel then slept with her as well, as revenge), having picked up a naked rambling disciple, Geoff, and having eaten all his meal with his mouth open and his organ swinging, eventually attempted to answer Macer's question.
Why live so far beyond societal norms? "It was hard for my mother to show love," Gough said, his hitherto vacant eyes filling with tears. He went on to explain that being naked was a way of getting closer to himself and of loving and accepting himself. The last we heard of the poor man, he was in prison in Edinburgh for disturbing the peace.
