Shooting the sheriff

TV REVIEW: The Sheriff and Me, RTÉ1, Sunday; Prime Time InvestigatesRTÉ1, Monday; The FrontlineRTÉ1, Monday; Victoria and Shane Grow Their Own, RTÉ1, Tuesday

‘IF YOU WERE soft-hearted at all, it wouldn’t suit you – you wouldn’t be the most popular man in town.” So said Noel (possibly not his real name), a great hulk of a man who drives an anonymous-looking van and makes his living as a bailiff.

Heralding this difficult week, RTÉ screened the timely and ultimately deeply sad documentary, The Sheriff and Me, an exploration of how the economic downturn and financial crisis has impacted on the lives of three Irish families. Each family featured was facing the possibility of a visit from the bailiffs and of having the family home stripped of its assets – the television, the couch, the family car – in a little fandango of pointlessness officially known as debt recovery.

Although appointed by the minister for justice, the sheriff, the programme informed us, is independent, employing his own staff and running his business, like any other, to make money. However, seizing goods, Dublin county sheriff John Fitzpatrick assured us, is the last weapon in his armoury.

Presumably Fitzpatrick’s intention in allowing a crew to film the workings of his office was to communicate to the debt-heavy public that turning a blind eye to the brown envelopes and final demands is a short-sighted and dangerous strategy. After all, the man had hardly dressed up in his new suit to gloat over how damn busy his staff had become.

But what we got was no pragmatic infomercial; instead, this quiet documentary managed to underscore the despair that many are feeling across the country, as they watch their businesses and lifestyles drain away like so much floodwater. Impassive servants of the system, such as Noel, may not shed a tear over your sudden separation from your idiosyncratic microwave or the antique family rocking horse, but the testimony of ordinary people crashing under the assault of debt was heart-rending.

“We used to go for breakfast in Banagher on a Saturday, then on to the toy store,” said one young mother, explaining the changed circumstances of her family since her husband, now fighting depression, lost his job as a builder two years ago. Another couple were struggling to support their six children on the income generated from their small hardware store in Dublin’s Clondalkin. As the stock sat dusting over on the shelves, the creditors rang the phone off the wall and the geraniums shielded themselves from the bitter winds of last summer, the owners, pallid and exhausted, described the crippling anxiety of watching their livelihood collapse.

“We’ll be back again,” said a pixillated Noel, as he pulled his weary frame away from another household whose owner, after a polite but firm inquiry from the sheriff’s department, had promised to come up with cash or a banker’s draft before the next visit. “We’ll be back again,” he murmured, settling himself into his roomy van, “but our attitude can change, you know.”

PIXILLATED FACES raged like an uneasy plague across the national broadcaster this week, especially on Prime Time Investigates, which kicked off a new season with an undercover exposé of the increase in welfare cheating. The programme's revelations were gobsmacking: the estimate the programme seemed to accept was that 10-15 per cent of the entire social welfare budget is leaking from the coffers on fraudulent claims.

From those operating with two PPS numbers (one for their employer, the other for claiming State relief) to some Border towns where there are more social welfare claims than there are residents (in the North, unemployment benefit is approximately one-third of the equivalent in the Republic), the vast benefit system seems hampered by its size and unable to flick the ever more aggravating fly from its hide. According to Labour TD Roisin Shortall, this problem constitutes “a huge national crisis”.

The programme suggested that if fraudulent claims could be eliminated there would be no need for social welfare cuts. Its makers were at pains to point out that the vast majority need and are entitled to the social welfare payments they receive, but acknowledged that, as one north Dublin health worker said, the defrauding of the system had the “potential to stigmatise a whole section of society”. If you were living on the breadline and unable to feed your children, she went on to ask, which would be the greater crime: squeezing more out of the Government or letting them go hungry? The investigation, as one expects from this consistently excellent strand, was meticulously researched, but in these nervily unpredictable times, one wonders about the advisability of doorstepping people who have been caught cheating the system, especially migrant workers who might be more vulnerable than the rest to a backlash of anger from the communities in which they live.

BETWEEN THE BUDGET predictions and the weather, one was tempted to think that the damn week couldn't get much worse. But no, there seemed to be a specifically designated chill wind for every hour, blowing through our living rooms. Crouching over the cat to try and get some heat, it occurred to me that perhaps I could warm myself vicariously on the dependable ire of The Frontline. Unfortunately, I tuned in during an ad for Ferrero Rocher, involving torso-heavy actors decked in plastic breastplates, hamming it up alongside a half-dozen or so pouty ladies with coiled hair extensions and bondage bracelets, all shooting chocolate balls at each other with archery sets in the clouds.

“When the gods of Mount Olympus want to celebrate . . . they extrude foil-wrapped chocolate orbs from their virtuous bottoms” (or some such tripe), articulated the cloying voice-over. By the time he had finished shovelling his baloney into my ears, I was starting to pine for the ambassadors’ parties of Ferrero Rocher yore.

Anyway, when The Frontlinerestarted, Pat Kenny was midway through corralling a raging studio audience as they clashed about clerical sexual abuse. While some believed that the bishops (and indeed the entire hierarchy) should face the music of their collective negligence and throw in their croziers, there were others who argued that, as a society, we shouldn't chuck out the sacramental baby of Catholicism with the bathtub (so to speak).

One woman, dressed with meticulous attention to detail, pretty much suggested, through lips pursed and scarlet, that the whole sickening debacle had been due to the fact that we’d all lost sight of the Holy Spirit (this caught the attention of the cat, who went to check for it behind the couch). In response, a burly bloke in the front row suggested that, as far as he was concerned, we could seek the divine in the jolly green giant if we felt so inclined, but he still wouldn’t trust an education system dominated by Catholic doctrine.

For a brief moment, this collective opinionated ardour seemed to warm the room, but then a middle-aged man in a suit and tie, sitting at the end of one of the rows, broke the illusion, his pale eyes filling with tears as he told Kenny that it had taken 30 years of despairing silence before he was able to confide in his wife about the clerical sexual abuse he had suffered as a child.

This television year has been punctuated by the searing and unforgettable testimonies of men and women who were abused by Catholic clergy, and their voices continue to ring with a sobering clarity. Noisy, diverting arguments about holy spirits and jolly green giants are all very well, but it is the tentative, courageous voices of the previously silenced that we need to listen to through the national cacophony.

HOME-GROWN ROCK'N'ROLL: VICTORIA AND SHANE TAKE UP THE TROWEL

Move over, Ozzy and Sharon. Someone has had the anarchic idea of asking Victoria Mary Clarke and her boyfriend, Shane MacGowan, to become fashionably self-sufficient and live on the proceeds of Victoria's potted urban garden (the occasional potato and pale lettuce cowering under the assault of MacGowan's guitar barrage) in Victoria and Shane Grow Their Own. There was a fly in the ointment, however: VMC has a "rock'n'roll lifestyle" to sustain, and various "angels" to communicate with, which doesn't leave her a whole heap of time for digging and weeding. "Victoria's rock'n'roll lifestyle forces her to abandon her tomatoes," sighed Stephen Rea, who supplied a wry voice-over heavy with irony.

All was not lost! VMC’s mate, Marina Guinness, lent her an allotment on her estate, and a harvest party was planned. But that old RRL (rock’n’roll lifestyle to you) got in the way again: first the neglected potatoes developed black spots (“Makes you think about your ancestors,” marvelled VMC. “Lucky for me I have Lidl”), and then, after VMC had returned from RRL-ing in Norway (where she’d been busy interpreting MacGowan’s wheeze), caterpillars had eaten the crop. Guinness suggested VMC feed the caterpillars to the hens. “I’m so glad they are being killed by someone who appreciates them,” said Clarke, as the hens pecked bloodily.

The harvest party was a great success, and despite Shane’s penchant for contributing bottles of his own urine to charity auctions, bemused neighbours arrived with baskets of home-grown produce (probably because the clean-living saddoes don’t actually have an RRL to write home about). Oh God, this one could run and run.