"I WANTED to find my parents and kill them," said Christine Buckley, "for every ounce of pain that I suffered because of them."
You could hardly blame her. Abandoned in 1950, aged four, to a Dublin orphanage run by Sisters of Mercy, she encountered sisters of sadism instead. Dear Daughter, shown on RTE on Thursday night, was one of the most harrowing, but most important, home produced programmes of the year.
It was screened just when the Catholic clergy thought it was safe to get back into PR and at a time when stories about paedophile priests do not shock as they did even as recently as a year or two ago. But another type of monster from Holy Ireland was exposed the psycho nun who would shine a thick stick to beat the children in her care until they had to be hospitalised. The shining suggested a pride in her work a sense of vocation gladly undertaken and dutifully fulfilled.
The catalogue of alleged abuses and it has not been contradicted by the order was horrific. Babies, six and eight months old, were strapped, Dying Rooms style, to potties all day with the result that their rectums would collapse. Older children were locked in a dungeon like furnace room for days on end. Many of the children were so hungry that they used to steal carrots and lettuce from the orphanage's pet guinea pigs and rabbits.
They worked too making rosary beads, by hand. The wire would cut through at the top joint of the index finger on the holding hand. The children bled, but still had to meet a quota of 600 beads per child per day or face a thrashing. It was, quite simply, slave labour and it was hard not to wonder how many well intentioned, plenary indulgence seeking prayers, pieties and penances were mouthed out and counted out on such bloody beads.
For that was the context. As Catholic Ireland devoutly fell to its knees, prayer to shivering prayer and all that, Catholic Ireland was, we know, sexually and physically abusing children on a massive scale. Christine Buckley was once beaten so badly by the unidentified Sister Sadist of the Shining Stick that she had to get about 100 stitches in her leg. On another occasion, perhaps too tired from walking up a flight of stairs, Stick just poured a kettle of boiling water over 10 year old Christine's right thigh.
There was psychological torture too, of course. The children (known, in the Auschwitz tradition, only by numbers) had to hold up their soiled underwear for inspection they were regularly made stay awake until the early hours of the morning and always, there was the knowledge that violence was on its way. This was state sponsored terrorism, alright, for the State had handed control to the Catholic Church, which, in turn, either would not or could not control the fundamentalist psychos in its midst.
Without doubt there were individual aberrants who took pleasure in dehumanising children. But within the Church and within the larger society, there was a plain hatred of disadvantaged children which allowed the nutters to flourish. At the core of a lot of these abuse scandals is a way of thinking and of viewing the world which will not just fall away, even though it would actually be in the interests of Church power for this to happen.
Even the offer by Sister Helena O'Donoghue, current provincial of the Sisters of Mercy to arrange counselling for orphanage victims with another Sister of Mercy, shows this fundamental gulf in world view. Sister O'Donoghue's offer was, it's only fair to believe, well intentioned. But clearly she cannot understand that reparation requires taking cognizance of the terms of the wronged party, rather than assuming you know best yourself. Either the Church doesn't want to, or cannot get this idea straight.
Produced and directed by Louis Lentin Dear Daughter was powerful television. As docu-drama a format which becomes riskier in direct proportion to the sensitivity of the subject matter it worked well. It, was though, really two programmes (a) the orphanage and (b) the subsequent quest of Christine Buckley (despite an obstacle course that could have been designed by John Major) to find her natural parents.
The quest would have made a fine programme in itself, but such was the power of the orphanage story that it paled by comparison. Christine Buckley was number 89 in the Goldenbridge orphanage. Ann Armstrong was 139 Julie Cooney was 161 Sheila Doyle was 29 Bernadette Fahy was 138 Caroline Hunt was 57 Kathleen O'Neill was 95. We all know there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, more where they came from all products of the tender mercies of Holy Ireland.
IN contrast to parents abandoning young children, this week's Under the Sun dealt with the splendid idea of parents abandoning grown children.
Titled Spending Tie Kids' Inheritance the programme followed some of America's elderly "snowbirds" who migrate from the northern states in winter to Quartzsite, a small desert town in Arizona, boosting its population to about one million.
Many of the snowbirds have sold their homes some primarily to stop their children calling around and spend all their time on the road. There are now more than six million "motor homes" on US high ways. These motor homes range in size from tiny vanettes to huge articulated efforts that look like a medium size scheme of terraced houses with wheels attached. In a sense, the snowbirds are really elderly runaways.
"I had a nine room house but I ain't gonna be a slave to no house ever again," said Penny Cheney. Penny is 86. When she was 65 she bought herself a present, a Luger automatic pistol. We saw her examining a canister of pepper spray and a shining, new automatic rifle. Penny, like a lot of the other snowbirds, has discovered the cow person in herself. Annie Oakley is her alter ego and she's having a real good time.
In November the temperature in Quartz site, like the average age of the snowbirds, is in the "mid to high 70s". The elderly nomads play cards, visit nearby casinos (well, 150 miles away is near for a snowbird) and dance a lot. "And is there hanky panky?" inquired an off camera interviewer. "Oh yeah, there's quite a bit, but people are really worried about Aids. You don't know where all these others have been." On the wall there was a sign which read "Dance at your own risk."
Quartz site attracts younger people too business types selling "services". There's a ready made market here for pain remedies, health care products, security devices and there's quite a run on aphrodisiacs, especially Spanish fly. Steve Crane and John Nelson, RV (recreation vehicle) upholsterers, make a good living out of Quartzsite. "You mightn't believe it, but a lot of these rigs are designed for Playboy sex," said Steve.
To the unkind, Quartzsite is a vast, seasonal Wrinkle City, USA. Almost all of its residents are "blue collared snowbirds" or, in other words, not particularly wealthy. Hence the bumper sticker which gave the programme its title, for many of them are spending their kids' inheritance. It's strange really. They are the generation which can recall the Depression and fought in the second World War. At the end of their lives, their general advice seems to be don't take too much too seriously, stay out of nursing homes and dance at your own risk. Good, eh?
WRITE at your own risk" might have been the advice given to the creative writing students in David Lodge's The Writing Game. Certainly, those under the tutelage of hard chaw American novelist and academic, Leo Ratkin (George Segal), were risking their egos. His criticism wasn't just blunt. It was bulldozer with a bad attitude.
Attempting too much with characters too thin, this was far from Lodge at his best. It was, in fact, little more than a bed hopping face designed as a take on creative writing courses, American v English literature and literary creatures. Segal, mind, was the best of an irritating cast off characters. Susan Wooldridge was the schoolmarmish, nymphomaniac writer of pot boilers and Michael Maloney was the obnoxious Oxbridge experimental writer (i.e. "chancer").
The main problem with The Writing Game was that it became so self referential that its gaze slipped below routine navel gazing until it became a form of literary, masturbation, Clearly, this is a danger in writing about writing, but the joke of using literary devices to lampoon those very same devices, while clever, cannot be sustained long.
There was also the fact that this production didn't look so much like an adaptation as a straight filming of a stage play. And so the theatricality was turned up too loud.1 Writers and wannabee writers like those presented in The Writing Game indeed written in The Writing Game did not seem like real writers, or more importantly, like real people.
David Lodge is a real writer and a real person, but could he see himself in this play? Leo Ratkin's "literary" novel was titled Soap a word which, as metaphor, has resonances ranging from Auschwitz to popular TV drama. Lodge didn't quite turn his characters into soap, but the smugness of this drama dehumanised them all the same.
FINALLY, Our Friends in the North. The sixth episode of this 12 part TV drama reached 1979 Thatcher time As a political lesson couched in a socio rant, with period pop music to remind you of what you might have been doing at the time, it's been excellent. Politics as entertainment is a dangerous brief, but they've managed, for the most part, to pull it off with this one.
The wigs issue just won't go away though. Where did BBC get these wigs? As job lots from Planet Of The Apes? Certainly, Nicky had a Planet job for a few weeks and it was much too big for him. It looked like a kept made of hair. And Geordie? His hair didn't change at all throughout the 1970s. There wasn't even evidence of a wash. Tosker, at least, is going bald and Mary is allowed to keep her own hair.
Anyway, Nicky, finished with armed revolution, got a Derek Hatton haircut this week. He still lost the Labour seat though, to an ultra smarmy Tory woman. He foundered on the classic left wing mistake political beliefs. The 1980s come next and the haircuts, at least, shouldn't be such a problem. The dole queues will lengthen, of course, and the pop music will inevitably deteriorate. This week though, it is 1950s Ireland which is really in the dock.