IT'S got to be the sound bite of the year. "Go way, ye wife-swappin' sodomites" hissed No Divorce campaigner, Una Bean Mhic Mhathuna. Seething with a sibilance, which, given the context and the syntax, shot the word "assonance" to mind, Una Bean's rebuke to reporters was a revealingly hostile end to a campaign which had opened with a little prayer.
The No Divorce Campaign's journey from piety to pugnacity was splendidly captured by Donald Taylor Black's Hearts and Souls. First screened on the night that Irish hearts and souls were focused on Anfield, for the Ireland v Holland Euro `96 play off match, this fly on the controversial posters documentary, didn't attract the attention it deserved first time round.
But I was a gripping repeat. The buildup to Una Bean's assonating climax was striking for the paradox of the modernity of the fundamentalism on display. In blue tinted mirror shades, the No Divorce gang's campaign manager, Peter Scully, barked into a mobile phone when he wasn't tapping away on a lap top computer. This clash between style and substance made him seem like a bizarre, turbo charged, yokelish yuppie.
But this guy had energy. The external modernity and internal traditionalism, which he embodied, were each as fierce as the other. Unfurling an "Hello Divorce.. . Bye Bye Daddy" poster he, I understand the yuppie term is "bounced it oft", the No Divorce Campaign's vice chairman, Gerard Casey. "Do you think it's catchy?" inquired Scully. "Yeah, yeah," said Casey.
And catchy it was. In its dangerous simplification, it caught the tone and mood of the No Divorce Campaign's scare tactics. Casey had advised the troops not to be dissuaded by any charges of scaremongering. All of our rational points have an emotional dimension," he told the faithful during an early pep talk. He stressed that the campaign should go big on emotional impact.
Of course, we knew all this anyway. In many ways, the most telling scenes were the quieter asides. At one point, one bloke was complaining about Cork local radio not stopping a Nell McCafferty interview to ring out The Angel us. Furious about this he adopted a confidential tone. "I know if I had to choose between Nell McCafferty and the Mother of God, who I'd choose," he said. His colleagues nodded in agreement his (on their terms) axiomatic assessment deemed to have furnished an irrefutable conceptual understanding of the issue at hand.
It was this mind set of having a franchise on God, of personal faith effortlessly assuming the status of universal fact, which was most illuminating. Certainly, the conviction of the No Divorce campaigners was startling. God, and His Mother, were on their side, so rationality as Gerard Casey had indicated wasn't really at the races.
Neither, in truth, was the campaign's chairman, Rory O'Hanlon. A former judge, Rory gave the impression that he was mildly bewildered that his opinions could be open to contradiction. Perhaps years of making pronouncements from the bench does this to a bloke. But, whatever the reason, he seemed unprepared for the cut and thrust of public debate and he was not impressed by a Mary Robinson speech "about tolerance and what not".
In a cast that might have been modelled on a soap opera Scully, the dynamic, scheming yuppie Casey, the ideologue of the campaign Niamh Nic Mhathuna, the young tigress daughter of the show's diva, Una Bean the judge might, reasonably, have been expected to fill the patriarchal Jock Ewing role. But wisdom, albeit smug wisdom, characterises such soap patriarchs. Rory, in contrast, seemed more weary than wise and, crucially, took a pasting from Fine Gael's Enforcer, Michael Noonan, on the final Questions and Answers before polling day.
And so, with Biblical drama, it came to pass that Una Bean Mhic Mhathuna stole the show with the same sort of melodramatics that Joan Collins had used to steal Dynasty. The vote had been desperately close 818,842 Yes against 809,728 No. Had rain not fallen from the heavens above the west of Ireland on the evening of polling day, the result could easily have been reversed.
As a record of an Irish media campaign, this documentary should be shown to second level students. Donald Taylor Black won penetrating access, although you've got to wonder if the No Divorce group carried on like this in front of the cameras, what were they like in privates. In fairness, they were unlucky not to win but, having seen Hearts and Souls the prospect of "Hello Una Bean... Bye Bye Divorce" should make us all grateful for God's tender mercy.
ANOTHER man, certain he held the franchise on God, was Douglas Haig. Doug was the British commander in chief on the western front during the first World War Time watch attempted a re-appraisal of Doug who, for decades now, has been characterised as a donkey who led lions. It wasn't altogether rehabilitating and it reminded you that in 1916, there was just as much unholy belief in blood sacrifice at the Somme as there was in the GPO in O'Connell Street.
In fact, beside Doug's, Patrick Pearse's credo was a mere pin prick. If blood letting was your thing, Doug was a kind of slaughterhouse sultan, an abbatoir admiral, a general of gore. Mind you, unlike Patrick Pearse, Doug wasn't especially keen on spilling his own blood. But then again, he was a mastery military tactician an El Tel of the battlefield, whose favourite ploy was to get the troops to climb out of their trenches and walk, purposefully mind, towards the German machine guns.
The first half a dozen times, this audacious strategy almost certainly had the virtue of surprise. But Doug was a single minded man. Certainly, his tactics ensured that millions of young British women would remain single all their lives. At the Somme, though in fairness, the battle was partly forced upon him by the French, Doug's brilliant strategy lasted for 142 days. On the first day, there were 60,000 British casualties of whom 20,000 died. Caught the Hun completely by surprise, did Doug.
It seems that Doug was receiving regular intelligence reports that just one more push would break the Germans. So, at the Somme, Doug held his nerve and went for 141 one more pushes. He was backed by the king and the king's friends in this magnificent plan. "It was criminal negligence," said John Laffin, the author of the bluntly titled British Butchers and Bunglers of World War 1.
But Doug has his apologists too. Other military historians deny that he didn't understand technology or that he was an old fogey with an absurd liking for cavalry heroics. Maybe he wasn't. But, seeing himself as an instrument of God and with a world view entirely inappropriate for the industrialised world of the 1910s, Doug Haig does appear to have been an anachronism in his own time.
His supporters polemicised beside monuments of the Great War. Eighty years have passed since the Somme and the world has altered, drastically. And yet, there was something obscene about tweedy historians defending Haig. He may have meant well, believed in his tactics and prayed to his God. But he never went up to the trenches to dirty his boots. Because it stamps power with distance and mystery, hauteur impresses some underlings. But others see it for the pompous device it is and for the deliberately dehumanising effects it has on those it controls.
Haig was praised by the revisionists for "holding his nerve" in the face of mounting casualties. Fair enough, but proportion demands that this form of nerve holding be compared with that required to get out of the trenches and walk into the bullets. There was extreme courage shown by soldiers in the first World War. Many indeed were lions, but the donkey lionised on Timewatch was not. A slightly sinister programme from a generally reputable series.
SINISTER, too, was Jaws In The Med, a documentary about great white sharks snacking on swimmers and scuba divers in the Mediterranean. Mind you, since
1909 there have been just 40 recorded attacks (with 18 fatalities), but when you go on that stress releasing summer holiday, remember . . . they're out there and they're probably hungry.
The stretch of water between Malta and the coast of north Africa is, allegedly, particularly dangerous. A reconstruction of an incident from the 1950s, when a British swimmer, Jack Smedley, was eaten by a great white was pure Jaws. With an underwater camera shooting upwards at dangling legs piercing the light at the surface, the horror was palpable. Then a rush through the water. Cut to the surface and then snap! More Somme than summer.
Still, the savagery of the fisher folk of Favignama island, west of Sicily, was more shocking. Every year, they hold a festival which involves constructing a "death cage" of netting into which they herd tuna. Between 1953 and 1988, they netted 16 great whites too. Following the tuna, the sharks got trapped in the death cage. Landed and gutted, poorly masticated dolphin were found in their stomachs. It was not pretty.
For all that, there was humour in this documentary. Great white sharks, when they are mating, give each other love bites. As excitement rises, the biting can edge towards the kind of S&M session, that leaves marks no polo neck or scarf could hide. A pair of great whites, uncontrollable with passion, redefine the intensity or oral sex. This, as David Coleman might say, is the Big One. But, whether or not they engage in wife swapping was not made clear. Excellently filmed, if mischievously alarmist, this was a documentary to set your teeth on edge.
FINALLY, Hello Europe, This Is Temple Bar. With an American aircraft carrier about to arrive in the bay, the Europeans got their invasion in first. They came to Temple Bar for a televised hooley with music by The Corrs, Shaun Davey, Virginia Kerr and Anuna. The music was fine, but do other countries do this sort of thing when they take over the presidency of the EU?
Not that we should ape them anyway. But it would be helpful if our politicians were more honest about the effects of our relationship with Europe. Of course, it's good (as they tell us often enough) that we now enjoy, on average, a standard of living which is 80 per cent of the EU standard. But, with increased affluence, we can also expect increased crime. Even the great white sharks of the Mediterranean go where the pickings are richest. Hello Europe... Bye Bye Innocence."