Years of excellent investigative print journalism on paedophile priests in Ferns was unable to achieve the same impact as 50 minutes of victims and their families telling their stories to camera, writes Patsy McGarry
One has to ask why it took the BBC to make last night's Suing the Pope programme?
Why is it that so many of the most effective investigative television programmes about Irish affairs have been made by British channels?
Susan O'Keeffe had to go to Granada Television to make the Where's the Beef programme in 1991 which led to the Beef Tribunal.
And in 1994 it was Chris Moore of UTV's Counterpoint programme who exposed Father Brendan Smyth. Then there were those British documentaries about the Birmingham Six, the Maguire Seven, the Guildford Four, which were crucial in correcting those injustices.
There have been exceptions on Irish television, of course. There was Mary Rafferty's hard hitting States of Fear in 1999 and Paul Cunningham's Bad Blood, last year, about how Irish haemophiliacs were infected through blood supplies from the US. And Brendan O'Brien's recent Prime Time on the Middle East.
But why did RTÉ not produce a programme like Suing the Pope? Or TV3? Or TG4? The material was on their doorstep. And though they may say to the print media "what did you do", that really is not the point.
The print media, through the work of Alison O'Connor, Veronica Guerin, Jim Cusack, who first broke the story in the 1980s, and Ger Walsh of the Wexford People could hardly have brought the story further.
The culmination of the print effort was the publication of Alison O'Connor's book A Message From Heaven in 2000. There seemed little more that print could do about this tragedy.
It needed TV. No amount of quotes on paper can compare with the effect of seeing a person tell his/her story on camera. There was little new in the programme, but it was the first time the four men spoke of their experiences on TV.
There was the heartbreaking upset of Mrs Monica Fitzpatrick as she recalled finding her son's body. And there was Bishop Comiskey incongruously singing, then obfuscating, and that hugely symbolic moment as he closed a sacristy door on the camera.
Could anything have illustratred more powerfully the Catholic Church's manner of addressing - or not - the problem of paedophilia?
It was the emotional power of television that brought home to a larger public the enormity of what has taken place in Ferns. And it was that which spurred the laity there to such anger their bishop felt it best to go. Words simply cannot compete with such images.
Modestly, Sarah Macdonald, reporter and director on Suing the Pope, has said "I don't believe it was the film that finally forced Dr Comiskey to resign." But it was her film that caused the people of Ferns to respond in that way. Possibly Susan O'Keefe had a point when she said at a 1993 conference in Dublin: "I think in Ireland people are used to a kind of silent situation. It's much more comfortable to say nothing than it is to stand up and speak out."