Children in the frontline

Keelin Shanley's new series, Faraway Up Close, sets out to investigate the countries where Irish taxpayers' money is being spent on aid. It began this week with a report from Uganda, the largest single recipient of Irish aid, with €480 million being spent there last year.

Southern Uganda is experiencing an unprecedented economic upturn that has birthed a fledgling middle class (golf and rugby clubs, cinemas and shopping malls springing up around Kampala); but northern Uganda, where Shanley visited Gulu, the centre of the Ugandan army's war against Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), is a world apart. Kony's stated aim is to rule Uganda by the 10 Commandments, and in his quest to do this more than one and a half million people have been forced to leave their homes and are now living in displaced persons' camps. Kony's army has abducted more than 30,000 children and forced them, using appalling brutality, to become child soldiers and sex slaves. It is understood that most of the abducted children are now dead.

Shanley interviewed some of the children who walk up to eight kilometres a night to take refuge in "Noah's Ark", a shelter in Gulu funded by Development Cooperation Ireland (DCI), the State's development assistance agency.

"I want to be a leader," one little boy explained. "This political instability must change."

"What kind of leader? A military leader? asked Shanley. "No," he smiled. "A socialist leader."

GUSCO, another DCI-funded project, attempts to rehabilitate former child soldiers. The process is slow; these children have been forced to kill ("the civilian's head on a block, the children would be forced to beat it with sticks until the person was eventually dead"). These grief-stricken children have survived. They are the lucky ones.

Mairtín Ó Fainín, Irish ambassador to Uganda and former broker in the Northern Ireland peace process, has been working with the Ugandan government to negotiate a settlement with the LRA, and has been instrumental in brokering an amnesty for its members. The reason for this amnesty, Ó Fainín explained, is that although the Ugandan military is winning the war, it is children - some the very young progeny of abductees and soldiers - who are being killed when rebel strongholds are attacked. There was sobering footage of small bodies lying dead in the bush, the victims of this pitiless conflict.

"Collateral damage," said the press officer for the Ugandan army. "What do you do with a child that is killing adults? Go to a church and pray?"

Faraway Up Close had an ultimately optimistic outlook. The frontline projects to protect children and the negotiations to end the violence are having palpable results. "Kony's holy spirit can see into the future," one former LRA captain told Shanley. "But now he has lost his powers." The LRA recently announced that it is prepared to consider peace talks.

The UN aid target for 2007 is 0.7 per cent of gross national product. Ireland's contribution currently stands at 0.41 per cent. Shanley's investigations, continuing over the next five weeks, may help loosen Government purse-strings.

NORTHERN IRELAND'S SHATTERED peace talks in the wake of the Northern Bank robbery were the subject of Insight: Northern Bank Special. The programme having stated that "nobody knows who was actually responsible for the £20 million robbery" then went on to support the view of the PSNI and the British and Irish governments that the robbery was the work of the IRA. The facts are well known: five days before Christmas, two bank employees and their families were taken hostage; the men, under intense pressure and fearing for the lives of their families, were forced to assist in the robbery, which, presenter Chris Moore explained, had "poisoned if not killed the peace process".

As talks in Downing Street seemed poised to result in disarmament, if not the disbandment of the IRA, other talks behind closed doors were leading to "a spectacular show of IRA strength". Journalist Jim Cusack compared this operation to the Canary Wharf bomb, a meticulously prepared act designed to scupper the peace process in the mid-1990s.

The investigation is ongoing and Northern Bank has questions to answer. Why had it cut back on its security budget? Why was CCTV footage so degraded from over-used tapes that it became unusable? Why was a bank employee allowed to walk out of the bank with £1 million in a sports bag (the signal to the gang that the robbery could proceed)? And where, since the demise of the RUC Special Branch, was the intelligence that might have led to a tip-off to prevent the robbery? The programme looked back to the 1983 Maze Prison break-out by the IRA and drew arresting parallels between it and the modus operandi used for the robbery.

Speaking of the 1983 break-out and the hijacking of the van that had been delivering the prisoners' Sunday lunch, one former prisoner said the van driver had been put through "intense psychological moments". You don't say . . .

INTENSE PSYCHOLOGICAL MOMENTS were thin on the ground in Big Dippers, but its main characters also got lucky with a few million quid in unmarked notes. James Nesbitt played Ray, a small-time crook with a conscience, and once again let his eyebrows do most of his acting. Two lovable rogues, Ray and his sidekick Perry (Pearce Quigley), rogued it about a bit in Holyhead, and much to their amazement managed to steal a briefcase packed with cash.

Happy days until Nesbitt concluded they had stolen the ransom money needed to release a little boy who had been kidnapped. His quest to return the money resulted in a bunch of crims descending on the Holyhead/Dublin car ferry, where they were accompanied by some great ska tracks and indulged in a few good one-liners. Perry to Ray, while looking at a page three model: "Look at her, 17. I've got shoes that are older than that." The drama was a good use of a ferry on a wet Monday, though unfortunately Ray, the proud and absent father of the criminal boss's adopted son, sought closure by the rubbish chute and copious unconvincing hard-man tears were added to the mix.

With a back-story as saccharine and unappetising as a plate of yesterday's trifle in a force-10 gale, even Nesbitt's relentless likeability can start to make you feel a little seasick.

THE DARK CONTINENT of female sexuality couldn't look much bleaker than Salem in California, birthplace of the tobacco industry and home to Dr Stuart Molloy and his invention, the Orgasmatron. Molloy couldn't allow himself think about the money he could make if his little electrical box (12 years in the making) was to set alight the estimated 43 per cent of American women who experience some degree of sexual dysfunction. Bodyshock: Orgasmatron followed three women who volunteered for clinical trials. The procedure involved each woman having an electrode placed in the spine, and the use of electrical pulses to stimulate her nerve endings - in the hope that, if the pulses travelled in the right direction, she would achieve orgasm. The three women were deemed "anorgasmic" - two had never experienced orgasm and the third, who had lost sensation and desire following surgery, simply said: "I'd rather wash windows". Previous trials on 11 women had claimed four successes and the results of the televised trial were inconclusive: at least two of the women were devastated by what they perceived as further failure on their part.

Bodyshock the series can leave you feeling vaguely uneasy - the relentless focus on other people's misfortune adds up to a depressingly high dosage of vicarious misery.

BY CONTRAST, ON Arts Lives: Theatre in the Flesh, actor Olwen Fouéré's extraordinary fight back to health following a near-fatal road accident was uplifting. Fouéré was about to start rehearsal in Seamus Heaney's Burial at Thebes when she was dragged under a jeep as she stood with her bicycle at a pedestrian crossing on Dublin's Camden Street. Film-maker Dara McCluskey had been planning a documentary about Fouéré and the relationship between her cutting-edge theatre work and loss in her personal life. The documentary he ended up making followed Fouéré's remarkable journey back to work and her defiant performance of Passades with her company, the aptly named Operating Theatre.

Her journey from intensive care to rehabilitation hospital, from punishing insistence on her ability to get back to work (even if, like Sarah Bernhardt, it was with a wooden leg) to acceptance of her own limitations and the humanity of the care she was receiving, from her 50th birthday in a hospital bed to bathing her restored leg in the waters of her native Cleggan, Theatre in the Flesh was restorative television.