TV Review Hilary FaninCraiceann: An Sceal's roller-coaster ride through Irish sexuality brought us up to date this week, starting with some imaginative pre-Famine wake rituals on the western seaboard that makes advice from your average media-savvy sex therapist look like a recipe for the teddy bears' picnic.
Sex and death are great old mates and these spirited forebears invented some cracking good games to keep their spirits and various other bits up when a member of their community departed. These included three men in the shape of a boat, one semi-naked who had to be pulled out of the mud by his mast. Unfortunately for them and us the Famine arrived and these isolated, almost pagan communities were wiped out.
Seventy years on, we were told, the conservative middle class had turned this once joyous coast into a place that would rival a Muslim fundamentalist backwater.
By the time of the birth of the new State we were "Catholic, agricultural and confused". In 1926, one male in 50 was a priest - that's more young men joining the priesthood than we currently have joining boy-bands. In 1930, three-quarters of all men aged between 25 and 34 were single, there was a fourfold increase in admissions to mental hospitals and we had the lowest birth rate in Europe.
Women's stubborn inability to conceive without intercourse was also posing a bit of a problem. To pay for this deficiency, however, they were consecrated or "churched" after giving birth.
A survey carried out in rural Ireland in 1962 - when, across the water, the Beatles were already singing Love Me Do - found there was, in marriage, no kissing, fondling or foreplay. There was no oral sex, no homosexuality - lesbianism was as distant as feng shui and as unlikely as a virgin birth on a watery hill in Monaghan.
Extraordinarily, the same survey accredited male sexual striving to be a result of the massive amounts of potatoes they were eating. Spud you like?
WATERY HILLS AND their regretted absence were ruminated on by Patrick Kavanagh in The View Presents . . . Kavanagh Self-Portrait. This re-mastered film from the RTÉ archive, a 30-minute monologue from Kavanagh on his life and art, continued his centenary celebrations.
A sermon in black and white, involving two camera angles, a squeaky chair and a sheaf of notes for Kavanagh to refer to - the monologue was as austere as the poet's native stony grey soil.
The self, Kavanagh began, is interesting only as an illustration - as soon as we begin to analyse it, we destroy it. We get the facts right but the mood wrong.
Kavanagh's mood was bleak when he arrived in Dublin in late 1939, "the worst mistake of my life". He described, with customary tenderness and rage, "the years spent begging and scrambling around the streets of a malignant Dublin". He spoke of being installed as the "authentic peasant" among the bowsies and self-reverential intelligentsia he despised. "I could be seen," he said, "on the Dublin streets giving wild vicious kicks at emptiness."
To writers and artists who embrace themes of public importance to give their work longevity, Kavanagh said there is nothing as dead and damned as important things. It is the casual, insignificant things that are important - a person dabbles in something and then realises it is life. Courage is everything, he maintained, and our instincts are nearly always right, but the only way a good poet can remain true and keep up an adequate supply of whiskey is to be taken in by a rich woman.
Talking about his early life, Kavanagh described poverty and the barbaric life of the Irish country poor as a mental condition: "It is anxiety about what is going to happen next week, it is about lack of enlightenment to get out, it is about living in the dark cage of the unconscious and screaming when you see the light."
WELCOME TO SOUTH Hill. The bleak streets of Limerick's notorious council estate featured prominently in Prime Time Investigates: A Tale of Two Cities. Boarded and bricked-up houses on desolate streets sat next to the incongruous fortress one resident had built with iron gates and nine security cameras. South Hill is one of three estates that form a triangle of violence around Limerick in Ireland's bloodiest feud. We were shown re-enactments of some of the brutal shootings and stabbings that have hit the headlines over the past 18 months.
One man was shot in the back while having a drink after a funeral. Another was made to kneel on the ground beside his uncle while a gunman put a gun to the back of the uncle's head and blew his brains out. The kneeling man was then stabbed 17 times. He survived.
"I played dead," he said, "to get rid of them" - not too taxing a role, given the circumstances. There was also the bouncer who was murdered at his home because he wouldn't allow drugs past the door of the club where he worked. We were told of drug shipments of cocaine and ecstasy, with a couple of Kalashnikovs thrown in as sweeteners. Of warehouses in the north of England that are gun cash-and-carries, shopping malls of armaments. The rival gangs, the programme told us, are thought to be controlled by the English underworld and Irish paramilitaries.
There are, we learned, only about 100 people directly involved in Limerick's gang wars, and maybe 150 shootings, stabbings and bombings a year. The rest of the city tries to carry on, but commerce, trade and tourism are being hit.
The home of the Limerick State prosecutor was set on fire last year and gardaí have been threatened. Some streets are now patrolled by armed gardaí in riot gear - we could be "in Belfast or Bogota", said one interviewee.
The Limerick State solicitor told us the city is a microcosm of Irish life where crime is organising and taking on society.
The cast was depressingly familiar: the young men in hoodies with the obligatory gold chain and garland of spots around their necks; the angry widows; and then the next generation of foot-soldiers, the five- and six-year-olds, the 10- and 11-year-olds playing on bare, apologetic little patches of damp grass.
And then there was a clip from Today Tonight, the predecessor of Prime Time, in which a young Mary McAleese commented on a 1980s documentary examining South Hill's sociological disadvantages. There is, she said with prescience, an army of alienated children out there just waiting for the call.
KAVANAGH, DURING HIS monologue, bemoaned the Irishman's ability to lap up vulgarity. I stand accused. Why did I think The Day My Boobs Went Bust would offer a bit of light relief? There are two screamingly good reasons not to have breast augmentation (for the uninitiated, that's little bags of saline or silicone popped into one's incised breast by a very rich surgeon's gloved forefinger). Number one: it hurts. And the most gruesome and appalling things can happen afterwards. I saw, through the prism of my clenched fists, flesh-eating diseases attack a scar where the implant was implanted, gaping sulphurous wounds big enough for the bag to fall out of - and they did - that would have made Florence Nightingale blanch.
Then there's the leaking silicone which poisons the body and turned an insouciant American teenager who wanted to look pretty in a bikini into an exhausted, ill old woman barely able to get out of bed to curl her eyelashes.
These poisons can break through to the brain. And just like the real things, the bags sag and leak or sometimes get over-enthusiastic and increase in size. And then they have to be surgically removed - except that now they've got cosy and are hanging out with the heart and lungs and bits of tissue that they are reluctant to be parted from.
Number two: this torture is self-inflicted! Why, I was screaming at the moody 19-year-old actress-stroke-model, why let this lunatic draw black lines all over your lovely young body in preparation for this torture? Why, when medical practitioners clearly explain that these implants will have to be renewed every 10 years or so? What's that? Another four or five trips to the plastic surgeon before she's cryogenically frozen? Why?
The question was answered by a white-blonde, Botoxed architect with indelible eyeliner, a petulant Pekingese and fingernails that prohibit reasonable access to life. "I feel", she said, sitting upright on her candy-pink bed (she couldn't lie down for a few days as her repair surgery was still too fresh), "I feel fantastic, I feel as if I'm at the top of the food chain."
So that's it? Kavanagh said we all reach our destiny in the end. Some of us may choose to be amoebas.