TVReview: As political stasis continues in Northern Ireland with the ongoing suspension of the Assembly, a landmark BBC series, Facing the Truth, this week opened up a new dialogue (a loaded term on this quixotic island) between perpetrators and victims of violence during the Troubles.
In a televised approximation of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, the sagacious and unfailingly courteous Nobel Peace Prize winner, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who was hugely influential in healing the rifts caused by apartheid, presided over a series of emotionally fraught encounters.
The detailed recollections of the families of the dead ("I was calling him for his tea when we heard shots") and the haunting memories of the perpetrators ("I can still hear grown men calling for their mothers") at first seemed just terribly poignant. The purpose of the stories being televised, apart from the cathartic effect for the tellers, appeared unclear, but as the series doggedly unfolded over three nights there was a sense that, despite recidivist suspicion and echoes of old bigotries, a process bigger than the sum of its parts was taking place, a process that may indeed have a political impact.
Among the contributors was Mary McLarnon, sister of Michael McLarnon, killed, mistakenly it would appear, by British army officer Clifford Burrage when his shot, intended for a gunman, hit the 22-year-old bystander. Burrage, a committed Christian traumatised by his memories, came to Tutu's table seeking forgiveness. The impact of his frozen recollection was in the detail. He described "following the blood trail" to the McLarnon family's house after the shooting, seeing Michael's mother lying face down on the sofa, having fainted from shock, and offering Paracetamol to Michael's stricken father. Across the table, his memories were reflected back in the stoic face of his victim's sister.
Sylvia Hackett, shaking with grief, confronted the infamous loyalist killer, Michael Stone. Stone, freed under the terms of the Belfast Agreement, was sentenced to 600-plus years' imprisonment for murders including those at Milltown Cemetery.
Hackett spoke of the moment she realised that her husband would never return: the wake over, the neighbours departed, the mortgage company threatening repossession, pregnant and with a two-year-old daughter to take care of, she was entirely bereft.
The intelligence gathered by loyalist paramilitaries that her husband, breadman Dermot Hackett, was a member of the IRA was, his wife added, totally wrong. Those collection boxes he gathered after Mass, she told Stone, were for the St Vincent de Paul, not the IRA.
"I wouldn't have risked my liberty to kill an innocent man," Stone replied warily.
Later, having explained how he was trained to "dehumanise the target", he recalled that at the time of Hackett's assassination, his own wife was also pregnant.
"You're better people than I am," he told Hackett's widow. "I wish I could take your hurt away."
"Thank-you for allowing us the privilege of seeing your anguish and your pain," Tutu said calmly to the participants. "We are deeply humbled."
Sylvia Hackett then managed to shake Stone's hand, but could not help recoiling from the enormity of the gesture.
"It is God who is present in this moment," said Tutu with a deep and enviable conviction.
AFTER HIS EDGY appearance on last weekend's Parkinson, in which the defensive-looking British prime minister managed to perturb a swathe of his electorate when he spoke of God being his judge on the invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair will surely not be thanking director Michael Winterbottom for his memorable contribution to the debate. The Road to Guantanamo told the story of four young British Muslims from Birmingham who travelled to Pakistan for the wedding of one of them, Asif Iqbal. Three of the men ended up as the "property of the US marines" in Camp X-Ray, Cuba (the fourth is missing in Afghanistan, presumed dead).
Winterbottom's film, much of it shot against the straw-coloured scrub and dilapidated villages of northern Afghanistan and the vivid, bustling cities of Pakistan, interspersed interviews with the three men with dramatisations of their journey. Why the Tipton Three, as they later became known, ended up trapped in the Taliban's last Afghan stronghold, Kunduz, remains unclear. But whether they were simply young Muslims in the wrong place at the wrong time or young men on the trail of an ideology, nothing can justify the appalling inhumanity they suffered at the hands of their captors.
Having survived beatings, starvation and indiscriminate gunfire from the Northern Alliance, the men, after transportation to Guantanamo, endured intimidation, torture, sensory deprivation, stress positions, chains, shackles, hoods, dogs and outdoor cages (in which at first they were allowed neither to stand nor to pray), and constant hectoring to "sit up", "shut up" or "lie down" from their guards.
"Camp X-Ray is humane, appropriate and in keeping with the Geneva Convention - for the most part," said Donald Rumsfeld around the time of the early transportations. Just this week, however, when faced with criticism of the practice of force-feeding Guantanamo prisoners, the Americans claimed that the Geneva Convention did not apply, as those held at the base were "enemy combatants".
The Tipton Three were eventually released without charge. The message of Winterbottom's film rang out loud and clear: with perhaps as many as 500 prisoners still in detention, this barbaric institution must close.
IF YOU THOUGHT the only things under the savvy balladeer Liam Clancy's bawneen cap were a shillelagh and some expensive dentistry, think again. The man Bob Dylan described as the "the best ballad singer I've ever heard in my life" was the subject of Alan Gilsenan's illuminating Arts Lives film, The Legend of Liam Clancy.
The first half of the two-part documentary began with Clancy's early life in the handsome and decorous town of Carrick-on-Suir, where he was the youngest in a family of 11 children. In 1956 the young Clancy crossed the Atlantic to join his actor brothers in New York City and, in doing so, seemed to fall into the pages of a well-thumbed airport novel. Sex and booze and rock'n'roll sewn into the sturdy weave of an Aran sweater, Clancy opened up to reveal a man who may have appeared as innocent as a knitting pattern but was in fact made of darker materials.
Clancy's story was magnificently told - by Clancy. Like an actor in his own biopic, he revelled in the memories he shared with the unobtrusive Gilsenan, as in his poetic description of a short-lived return visit to Carrick in Christmas 1956: "Depression, greyness, misery, the wind blowing down William Street, the men's solidarity."
The meat of the story of Clancy's early years in New York was in his perilous romantic attachment to Diane Hamilton, nee Guggenheim (as Clancy later learned), a daughter of one of the wealthiest and most influential families in the US. The young non-drinking, non-smoking Clancy, attempting to build a career in the theatre, alternately battled the cockroaches in his brother's tenement-like apartment and endured the obsessive needs of his very rich and seemingly unstable girlfriend.
Revisiting Washington Square, in the heart of Greenwich Village - which he recalled ringing to the songs of Woody Guthrie and Josh White - Clancy described the alarming nature of Diane Hamilton's attachment. At one point, in an attempt to free himself from her control, he took a job as an assistant cameraman, but his hopes of independence were shattered when, in one particularly bunny-boiling moment, he arrived at the studio to find Hamilton working alongside him - she had bought the film company. There later followed a suicide attempt when Clancy sexually rejected her, though his liberty was eventually returned to him when Hamilton's father had her treated in a psychiatric hospital outof town. The second half of the film next week, continuing Clancy's odyssey into booze, fame and infidelity, should be well worth a view.
DID YOU KNOW that The Corrs were manufactured in a factory in Athlone? A generic family-values product, the skinny Celtic celebrities, along with the hirsute Kelly Family, were apparently spawned by a bunch of aliens. These unpalatable revelations were brought to us by Colin Murphy in his new "mockumentary" series, The Unbelievable Truth, which also introduced us to Lorraine, the fifth Corr, a strapping lass in an acrylic dressing gown, the Corr sister that history forgot - thankfully.
The quietly anarchic Murphy gets to air the dirty laundry of a certain high-kicking, mane-tossing Irish dancer over the coming weeks - look out for it.
