Madam, - It is not unusual for current affairs journalists or investigative reporters - as both of which, in print and in broadcasting, your columnist Mary Raftery has excelled - to take the view that only these approaches to journalism are authentic or revealing.
According to that mindset, treatments which fail to poke fingers, doorstep officials, or demand answers of Ministers are irretrievably soft or compromised.
Mary Raftery's column of September 15th last Thursday on our commissioned documentary series The Asylum challenges both its editorial focus and its tone. She asserts that the part of the Portrane institution dealing with mental disability has been identified as having the greater chronic failures, so this is what the series should have dealt with.
The director and narrator of The Asylum, Alan Gilsenan, made it clear at the outset that the Portrane institution deals separately with the two entirely distinct - and equally vast - areas of mental illness and mental disability, and that the series is directed toward the former.
Why is this decision fundamentally flawed or invalid? Surely it is reasonable for the film-makers to believe that mental illness is itself so vast and profound a subject that a distinct treatment of it, via an observation of the life of those in Portrane, is worthwhile? And is RTÉ not entitled to support the producers through an independent programming commission in order to bring this specific subject to the public view?
Ms Raftery dismisses the effort as not good enough. Why? Seemingly because the series fails to show St Ita's hospital at Portrane in a sufficiently dismal light.
On the tone of the documentary, Mary Raftery quite wrongly says it exhibited "a sense of nostalgia for the grand old days" - days in which, as she accurately points out, up to 19,000 Irish people were confined behind such institutional walls, more than 2,000 in St Ita's alone.
That Portrane was, at its founding, a forward-looking enterprise and an extraordinary piece of Victorian medical/social engineering, was recalled in the documentary precisely to counterpoint just how the independent Irish State failed to resource better treatment for its unfortunate citizens when the decades rolled on and better understanding was surely available.
Ms Raftery mistakes a respect for the myriad lives lived here, an awe at the sheer scale of the public health enterprise that St Ita's is and was, and a recognition of the human bonds that have frequently been formed within those walls for a fondness for the institution.
It is difficult to credit that any reasonable viewer could have been other than profoundly saddened by the interview with Teresa O'Rourke, who by her own account was serially raped by a responsible adult nearly 50 years ago, and confined in mental hospitals ever since. What nostalgia is there in the story of Larry Sheehan, 83, who had a mental breakdown in 1952, has been in psychiatric care ever since and has no known relatives or friends outside St Ita's?
Mary Raftery's column is welcome as a contribution by a serious and socially compassionate journalist to the debate which any documentary series of this sort should provoke. That debate is already under way, as shown by a wide range of phone calls to RTÉ's Liveline.
More than 470,000 viewers watched last Monday's broadcast - to the surprise of those of us who put the programme to air in peak viewing time, believing it to be important material but hardly likely to draw a crowd. We hope that, by the end of its four episodes, The Asylum will have contributed to a fuller understanding of mental illness and its public treatment.- Yours, etc,
KEVIN DAWSON,
Commissioning Editor,
Factual RTÉ Television,
Dublin 4.