TVReview: 'Roses are red, violets are blue, throw off your khaks and give us a goo," giggled a bunch of kids dashing home from underpaid jobs behind butchers' counters and in factory warehouses, to get ready for their big night out on Friday, February 13th, 1981.
Stardust, the controversial two-part dramatisation of the book They Never Came Home, written by Tony McCullagh and Neal Fetherstonhaugh, was aired this week to mark the 25th anniversary of the tragic fire at the Stardust nightclub in north Dublin which claimed the lives of 48 young people and maimed and injured more than 200 others.
Stardust focused on the experience of one family, the Keegans, whose three teenage daughters set off that night with their flicked-back hair, their shared lipstick and their high-heeled shoes, to watch the disco-dancing championship, meet up with their mates and have a laugh and a dance. Two of the Keegan girls, Mary and Martina, were among those who died, trapped in an inferno of blazing carpet-tiled walls, smouldering foam furnishings and a melting, inflammable ceiling.
Unforgettably and heart-rendingly executed in the drama were scenes of helpless teenagers, the Keegan girls among them, choking on, and blackened by, toxic smoke, desperately pushing against emergency exits which had been chained or blocked, scrambling to escape through impassable toilet windows, barred and reinforced with steel to prevent youngsters from entering the club without paying the £3 admittance. The Keegans' third daughter, Antoinette, was, apparently, one of the lucky ones; though hospitalised and given the last rites, she survived. Later she also survived an unsuccessful suicide attempt.
Should this drama have been made? Yes. Twenty-five years later the question of liability remains unanswered. The programme's meticulous recreation of the events leading up to the fire offers clues as to why this, the greatest single tragedy in the history of the State, remains in a bickering limbo of confusion and unanswered questions. Clearly articulated by the drama was that the children who died or were injured and their families, almost all from working-class areas around Coolock, an area at the time mired in unemployment, were silenced by an indifferent political and judicial system.
When, eventually, the victims and their families were invited to recount their trauma and reveal their scars to a compensation committee, they were told that money would be awarded on the proviso that they sign away their right to establish any liability for the deaths of 48 young lives. The legal route was open to anyone who chose not to accept this diktat, but as mother Chrissie Keegan, played with dignity and compassion by Ger Ryan, said: "no one had the money to do that".
This drama needed to be made because, a quarter of a century later, the young Antoinette Keegan's words have still to find a proper response: "The doors were locked, ma, we couldn't get out."
AS THE ENTIRE island knows by now, Channel 4's provocative documentary strand, Dispatches, sent two journalists undercover to train and work as cabin crew for Ryanair. Dispatches: Caught Napping sought to reveal worrying evidence that the low-fares airline was, shall we say, flying very close to the wind in terms of staff training (which the programme claimed was questionable) and security (which was said to be compromised), not to mention customer care (which looked to be bordering on the cruel and unusual). And with evidence of vomit-stained seats and exhausted cabin crew strewn around his airplanes like rag dolls, Michael O'Leary may need to do more than spin like a disco ball in Ayia Napa to distract us from the programme's allegations.
O'Leary's employees, although unaware that they were being filmed, were just as voluble as their boss when it came to discussing the airline, as when one senior crew member said: "It's the company philosophy: passengers don't matter - they pay money, they buy a ticket, then Ryanair doesn't care." Or this, from a sleepy stewardess, attempting yet another 25-minute turnaround with little or no time for safety checks: "You pay one cent for your ticket? Don't expect a lifejacket under your seat."
Whatever about being controversial, the entire programme was deeply depressing. Ryanair stewards are, it was claimed, paid £14 (€20.50) per short flight, £19 (€28) per long flight. One of the Dispatches reporters described getting up at 4am to go to work and getting home again at 5.30pm, and feeling, as the weeks went on (the journalists spent more than five months with the airline), dazed and bleary with exhaustion. One pilot told how a colleague, who had 10 years' service with the company, was demoted on the spot when, after a long delay, he reported that he was too tired to fly.
"You pay nothing for a ticket, you get nothing," concluded another crew member, wearily preparing to push her trolley of pricey confectionery down the aisle.
All allegations in the programme, needless to say, have been strenuously denied by Ryanair.
HALFWAY THROUGH THE building of Busáras, there was a change of government and the new lot decided to turn the planned bus terminus into a women's labour exchange (reassuring bit of positive thinking there). Shortly after hearing this news, the project's confused architect, Michael Scott, bumped into Myles na gCopaleen, who helpfully suggested that the building could now be renamed "the national bust terminal".
The architect was the subject of Arts Lives: Michael Scott - A Changed Man, a documentary film by his daughter, Ciarín Scott, which attempted to review the life and cultural times of an "unrepentant bon viveur" and (according to painter Louis le Brocquy) "unreconstructed militant artist".
"This is his life and how it shaped the cultural life of Ireland in the 20th century," the programme rather firmly asserted. And indeed Scott's life - given impetus, we were told, by the tragic loss of his mother, apparently by suicide, when Scott was a teenager - appears to have been fascinating.
An Abbey Theatre actor as well as an award-winning architect, his personal quest "in the grey decades of the mid-century" was, it seems, to enliven a society he described as "visually illiterate".
In the process he managed to annoy just about everybody, from the Irish artists he excluded from early Rosc exhibitions to the church hierarchy, which apparently viewed modern architecture as bordering on the sacrilegious. Probably best known for his controversial redesign of the Abbey Theatre (apparently, we can blame Ernest Blythe and an inadequate budget for getting a coal bunker to house the National Theatre), he was a larger-than-life figure, a friend of politician and poet alike.
Like many artists, he did not find domesticity easy, despite building a great big modern pile, Geragh, on the south Dublin coast for his family (one of his sons described it as being so cold one was in danger of getting hypothermia inside). In an effort to offer us a little intimacy with its subject, the programme included black-and-white home movies as well as the recollections of Scott's children.
So why did the film feel so distant, almost melancholy? Unlike Siobhán O'Casey's memorably beautiful and emotional film about her father Seán, Under a Coloured Cap, which similarly used family photographs and interviews with family members, Ciarín Scott's film felt stiffly self-conscious. Almost too even-handed about the responses to her father's work (described at one point as his "haphazard contribution"), this was a hard-working review of an influential and complex man who undoubtedly had a major influence on the country's visual climate. But despite its best efforts, somehow one never felt encouraged to get any closer to its subject.
IT'S DAY FIVE on 24, and if that makes no sense to you, none of this will either. Jack's not dead, former president Palmer is dead, Michele from CTU is certainly dead, Tony is on life support, and Chloe is alive, grim and sweaty but still breathing. So. Bet you're glad you know that. Oh, and militant separatists from the former Soviet Union are shooting people in an airport while President Logan is attempting to sign an anti-terrorism agreement with the Russian president, while his medicated wife, Martha, cooks up her eminently sensible conspiracy theories.
24 is great, and about as believable as Fox News, and includes some fantastically smart-arsed one-liners for you to practise on your friends, such as: "The only reason you're still conscious is because I don't want to carry you." Try it, you'll be really popular.
I know what happens until 11am, by the way, but not even a one-cent ticket to the Urals would induce me to tell you.
