Charismatic characters

TV Review: 'The man from God knows where," as narrator Miriam Kelly called him, quoting the ballad, was the subject of RTÉ's new four-part series, Haughey. The iconoclastic figure who dominated Irish politics for 25 years was surely grinning from one 80-year-old ear to the other as he watched his life and times gently canter across his television screen this week.

Haughey kicked off with The Outsider, an examination of the former taoiseach's family roots in Co Derry, his life in Donnycarney in north Dublin with an invalid father, his Christian Brother education at "Joey's" in Fairview with Harry Boland and George Colley, and the first wave of his political career up to his sacking by Jack Lynch and his subsequent arrest by the Special Branch in 1970 on a charge of conspiracy to import arms.

This fascinating and largely sympathetic examination included interviews with his children, with business partner Boland and with political colleagues and opponents such as PJ Mara and Garret FitzGerald (the latter apparently seen as a sissy by Boland and Haughey at UCD because he carried an umbrella and enjoyed the company of women). Their combined wisdom added up to a psychological portrait of a tenacious, competitive, intelligent, occasionally obnoxious, highly ambitious, egocentric man of exceptional ability.

Haughey's father, who later suffered from multiple sclerosis, was a member of the old IRA and spent time hiding from the Black and Tans in a dugout in the hills of south Co Derry. His mother, who had been a member of Cumann na mBan, moved their children to Dublin and, despite straitened circumstances, saw that all seven of them won scholarships to secondary schools. Haughey dedicatedly shook off the poverty of his early life, winning a further scholarship to UCD and becoming an accountant and a barrister before marrying Sean Lemass's daughter and joining Fianna Fáil, where his voracious political ambition pitched him against a party dominated by Civil War veterans.

One of the most interesting aspects of The Outsider was its analysis of how Haughey reinvented himself, in "Gatsby-esque" fashion, from a Northside boy with barely an arse in his trousers to a man of Ascendancy tastes and culture, a jodhpured connoisseur. His Abbeville home in north Co Dublin was described by his daughter, Eimear, as "being full of Irish wolfhounds, ponies, assorted dogs and people". Boland, meanwhile, was impressed by Haughey's determination to inform himself about the arts - "he made it his business" to be able to discuss a symphony.

Haughey's popularity, according to Declan Kiberd, was ensured by "intermittent acts of kindness" to the poor, such as the introduction of free travel for the elderly and changes to the succession laws, but Haughey's boundless generosity to himself soon became of greater public interest. Firing a chit across the table in anger, with instructions to get back the tax that was taken off his salary, and lucrative property deals with Matt Gallagher, were casually justified by his attitude that "he was doing a good job for the country", as his daughter said.

His patronage of the arts and introduction of tax exemption for artists came, we were told, from a genuine interest and a desire to "change the atmosphere" in the country. Certainly more likely to be seen in the back bar of Jammet's or slipping through a side door of the Gresham to soirees with influential business people than jiving at the crossroads with his wife and a pioneer pin, Haughey was accused of being "out of step with rural Ireland". Haughey, on close examination of his cufflinks, chose to ignore this criticism. The "young tiger of Fianna Fáil" rewrote the rules of engagement in public life, but, as in all such scripts, the hero was flawed.

Part one ended with Bloody Sunday, the arrival of more than 30,000 refugees from the North, the debacle of the arms trial, and the country in chaos. The coming weeks promise to offer a fascinating examination of recent Irish history.

HEROES FALL FROM grace but they rarely splinter. In Martha And Me, journalist Jamie Campbell followed the American media trail to West Virginia, where domestic goddess and lifestyle guru Martha Stewart was incarcerated in a women's penitentiary ("Camp Cupcake", as it is locally known) for obstructing the FBI during its investigation of insider trading at her multi-million-dollar company. Stewart, a daughter of Polish refugees, made her fortune selling homespun tips for gracious living to legions of aspirant Americans. From mantelpiece decorations to hammocks, birdbaths to picket fences, Stewart became the face of potpourri America, as crisp as a well-ironed sheet and as spiky as a flowering cactus. During her prison sentence her popularity remained untarnished and her company share price tripled.

Campbell, who has (unsuccessfully) modelled himself on Louis Theroux, was unable to fathom Stewart's hold over Americans and, while waiting to see if the prison would grant him an interview with her, decided to test her blueprint for living "simply and beautifully". He rented a trailer overlooking the prison grounds, and put up an advertisement in the local town: "Curious English boy seeks live-in Martha-lover." It should have read: "Supercilious and tedious English boy with baggy jeans and a budget from the BBC seeks archetypal Middle American to patronise." Expecting a Stewart clone with frosted nail varnish to respond to his petition, Campbell was surprised when Michael, a former headmaster, answered his ad to teach him the etiquette of living like Martha. They took a shopping trip to K-Mart and, on their return, hung reusable ivy swags out of the light fittings in the trailer. Michael happily stuffed the thawed-out poulets while Campbell (taking Martha's preference for fresh produce literally) gratuitously slaughtered a chicken from his newly built coop. The pair were not destined for gracious domestic bliss.

Campbell decamped and went off to dig the dirt on Stewart. He found plenty of it. One ex-friend and colleague described her as "greedy, righteous, indignant, unkind, snobbish and mean". Another claimed that Stewart had lied to and about her ex-husband, who wore headphones around the house because of the racket of the film crews who had virtually moved in and who ended up taking out a restraining order on her when, during their divorce, she allegedly trashed his offices.

Stewart may not be someone you'd want to spend the weekend with, and her supporters had a breezy insanity about them as they whispered in reverential tones about the stuffability of a cherry tomato, but they made one salient point: a man who makes millions and is hard-headed financially is a hero; a woman with similar abilities is a demon. And anyway, even if Stewart makes your trifle sink, and you think the diehard fan waving her "We Love You Martha" banner made from "a gingham 240-thread-count Martha Stewart bed-sheet" should be taken away in a little white van, you ended up rooting for the corporate goddess in the face of such smarmy, unoriginal, self-congratulatory and exhaustingly cool film-making.

'THE GREAT ONE-eyed giant born on the shores of the western world . . . the stethoscope and the microscope . . . must open its other eye to wisdom, compassion and spirituality."

Fergus Tighe's extraordinary True Lives documentary, John of God: Spirit Doctor of Brazil, was a moving, unsensationalised account of time spent with spiritual healer Joao Teixeira de Faria.

Every year thousands of people travel in hope to the village of Abadiania in Brazil, where Joao, in the course of his healing, performs surgery without anaesthetic, pain or infection. Tighe unobtrusively filmed various Irish sufferers who came for relief from brain tumours, multiple sclerosis and cystic fibrosis. None were "cured"; all, however, experienced improvements in their conditions and were deeply affected by the spirituality of the place. The casa where Joao and his followers work (donations are accepted but there is no fee) was described as "a portal ofspirituality" and Joao as a conduit through which "spiritual entities work". The power of Tighe's film was that it allowed an inherent scepticism to breathe, while letting the staggering facts speak for themselves.

Dr Jeffrey Rediger, an American academic from Harvard, was in Abadiania looking for calculable improvements in various cases - and he found them.

His struggle to come to terms with the "irrational" events he witnessed led to a conflict between his head and his heart. As he spoke of this dichotomy on camera, a stain appeared on his preppy T-shirt and he discovered a tiny wound on his chest emitting an emphatic and persistent flow of blood. He had been the recipient of "invisible surgery", a not-uncommon occurrence in Abadiania. The surgery, we presume, was to heal the rift between the conscious and the unconscious, the rational and the spiritual.

There are stranger things in heaven and earth: there's the grotesque . . . the unbelievable . . . the bizarre . . . the unprecedented . . . But that's next Monday, Charlie.