Looking for love - and sympathy - in all the wrong places

RADIO REVIEW:ARE THERE any fallen politicians or property developers out there who are deserving of our sympathy? Journalist Sam Smyth wasn't giving too much to Peter Robinson, who stepped aside as Northern Ireland's First Minister for six weeks on Monday, or his deeply troubled wife Iris. Understandably so.

She is seeking psychiatric help after revelations that she had an affair with Kirk McCambley two years ago when she was 59 and he was 19, and sought £50,000 from two developers to help him set up a cafe, allegedly keeping £5,000 for herself.

Smyth told Ivan Yates on The Breakfast Show(Newstalk 106-108, weekdays) their public repentance was late: "Peter Robinson found out about his wife's affair with this 19-year-old last March, they've lived together all year, going out together, being seen together, no sign of anything being wrong for nine months." Yates questioned Robinson's reports of his wife's fragile mental health: "Every time she gets in trouble . . . she seems to pull the lever of mental illness." On the issue of sexual morality, it's important to remember Iris Robinson's comments on The Stephen Nolan Show(BBC Radio Ulster, weekdays) in June 2008 when she described homosexuality as an "abomination". (Her other comments don't bear repeating.) In that context, her extra-marital affair makes a timely contrast to loving same-sex couples who cannot legally get married and who seek relationships that are honourable and true.

But people make mistakes. If Iris Robinson is mentally ill, rather than playing the theme from The Graduateon radio, perhaps one should now show her the compassion that she has so spectacularly failed to show others.

Few people feel sorry for property developers. Bernard McNamara spoke to Mary Wilson on Wednesday's Drivetime(RTÉ Radio One, weekdays). He was ordered to pay €62.5 million by the Commercial Court under a personal guarantee on loans.

McNamara paid over €412 million in 2006 for the Irish Glass Bottle site in Ringsend. It’s now worth €50 to €60 million. “We’re the pariahs of everything . . . I have no Jersey Island companies like some of the people who are after me have.” He said he is “broke” and his businesses are about €1.5 billion in debt. “Money has never been my goal . . . if money was my goal I would have quit a long time ago.” Well, one could say the opposite is also true.

“I never sought publicity,” McNamara said. “We hear about your dance floor that opens up into a swimming pool,” Wilson added, which was playing too much to the gallery. McNamara said, “I’m not ashamed of what I did. What I did created a lot of employment.” Wilson asked if he lost the run of himself. “Yes,” he said, but after a pause, went on to qualify his “yes”, saying he was part of a process. “I was sought out by Dublin Docklands,” he added, which is much of a muchness where personal responsibility is concerned.

Wilson asked if he expected sympathy. “No,” he replied. Which is probably just as well.

Barbara Cherish displayed no self-pity. She was poised and restrained and, as such, evoked a great deal of sadness and respect from me. She told Fergal Keane on Taking a Stand(BBC Radio Four, Tuesday) about discovering as a child that her father was former Auschwitz Commandant Arthur Liebehenschel.

She was adopted at 13 in the US. Her father was sent to the gallows after the Nuremberg Trials. He had joined the SS in 1932. Her biological mother died in a mental institution in 1966.

Divorce after 28 years of marriage, and the death of her eldest sibling, prompted her to seek out her past. “I just felt for the first time in my life that I was on my own,” she said, “and I needed to find out who I was.”

“He was the member of an evil organisation,” she said. “I think deep down he was not evil.”

Keane said in genocide it is ordinary people who do evil things. (Read Slavonic Drakulic's They Would Never Hurt A Flyabout war crimes in the former Yugoslavia for more on that.) "He knew there was only one way out of Auschwitz and that was through the smoke of the crematorium," Keane added.

Grasping at straws for a long-lost father, she naively wondered if Liebehenschel knew what Auschwitz would become. And if she met him again? “I’d tell him I love him and ask him all those questions I’ve wondered about.”

In order to honour the past, no matter how painful, she is courageous in wanting her children to know the truth too.