Would You Believe - RTE1 Thursday
Dan Dan, Dad and Me - RTE1 Tuesday
The Sins - BBC1 Tuesday
There's a brat in every family, some people believe, and in doing what he does, former footballer-turned-broadcaster Eamon Dunphy is only fulfilling his destiny. In a more public way than most. Others see something more complicated, they note his ability to suss out the rules in any organisation he joins - then cheerfully blow them out the window.
Thus Eamon had no great problems with the Irish soccer team when it lost 21 out of the 23 games in which he played. However when it started winning, duty, nay the national interest, called Eamon to do something about this very great scandal. So he continually criticised Jack Charlton, the team manager. Charlton responded in kind: "Well I don't like him . . . he's a bitter little man."
You can see Jack's point, but the truth is a little more complicated. Would You Believe (that missing question mark is infuriating), on RTE1 on Thursday could have settled for cuddly-Eamon-now-repents and becomes indulgent, slippered grand-dad. The wretch even claims to have found God, after mislaying Him for a long time. "I pray every day, every night" he said, adding that he was closer to Buddhism, and that his leaning was towards the spirit of God, rather than formal religion. And when did you stop being a bowsie and start being a buddhist was the (unasked) next logical question.
But much though he seemed to long for it, the title of Irish journalism's premier boot boy does not belong to Eamon. He's a good bowsie, but not a great one. Like the success which he admits eluded him on the English soccer scene, there's more to him than abuse and vilification. I welcome his apology to John Hume, but regret there was none to Pat Kenny or Dick Spring here. Mary Robinson had her motives in visiting famine victims in Somalia - a career-building photo opportunity according to Eamon's account, impugned in a way which most people, myself included, found very hard to take.
But there's the rub. Those who have worked with Eamon - and I'm one and enjoyed it, even the exciting dangerous bits - know all about the throwing of shapes, the unlikely positions taken, the rubbishing of those who disagree with him. They are also privy to the secret which this programme hinted at. Everything is inside out. He's not the mouthy ordinary guy he likes you to think he is. It's just as well. If Eamon Dunphy was really the man in the street, I'd advise you to stay home and order your groceries on the Internet.
Let's just celebrate him for the irascible - much though he'll hate me for saying it - precious original he undoubtedly is. And the fact that as a journalist he can throw objectivity so far out the window. "I'm not there to pontificate, my views don't matter at all " he said about his daily radio programme. Could that be our Eamon speaking? But wait - the sentence continues: ". . . I try to get them (my opinions) in as often as I can . . ." And there he goes, flying up one side of the street, down the other side and over the hill like quicksilver before you can say "Hold on Eamon, you can't do that".
That radio programme, The Last Word, went a long way towards saving a sinking radio station, remember?
And this TV programme neatly illustrated how you can make a religion-related programme without the whole exercise reeking with piety. What I really want to know is this. Now that Eamon has found God, what is he going to do with Him? Sorely try His patience, I suggest.
`Leave room for the Holy Spirit" was what the Mount Anville nuns in Dublin told their young charges when they spied them dancing too close to young men in the 1970s, a younger Mulcahy recalled . There was little room for the Holy Spirit in the bitter civil war waged between his grandfather, Richard "Dick" Mulcahy, and his former comrades in arms, after independence was achieved in the early 1920s. It was ended by the deaths of more than 70 men, deaths which were regarded as murder by the victims' families and friends, and an unfortunate necessity by Mulcahy and others who had them carried out.
This personal account of the lives of a founding family of Irish independence, was unflinching in its consideration of the fault lines of our recent history and that of a family close to the centre of events. The film -maker, Lisa Mulcahy, is a granddaughter of Dick Mulcahy, 1916 revolutionary, ruthless scourge of the Anti-Treaty rebels and co-founder of the Fine Gael party. At home he was Dan Dan to his grand-daughter, hence the title of this personal account Dan Dan, Dad and Me. This contribution to RTE1's True Lives series of documentaries goes a long way to meet the criticisms I made here last week of the waste of talent and resources in remaking the Millionaire lark.
Three storylines intertwined. One is the later life of Dick Mulcahy, the Waterford-born soldier turned politician who held the line for the Free State in the Civil War, and was hated for his part in the execution of more than 70 of his former comrades. The second is the story of his children and grandchildren, observed taking their places among the middle classes in the new Ireland Dick and his comrades had fought to create. And the third is the story of a big house in the Dublin suburb of Rathmines, where three generations of the family lived.
Were it not for the executions following the murder of Michael Collins, Dick Mulcahy, rather than John Costello would have been taoiseach in the 1948 coalition government, many historians believe. Were it not for those executions, the Free State might not have survived and the question of Costello rather than Mulcahy might not have arisen, say his defenders.
Following Collins's assassination there were fears about Mulcahy's security. He and his wife Min (Ryan) lived in a big house, Lissenfield, on Dublin's Rathmines Road, because it adjoined Portobello Barracks. Security considerations therefore provided six of Dick Mulcahy's own children and later six grandchildren with an idyllic childhood home, which continued until the late 1980s.There was a big rambling house, two acres of land, an orchard, a kitchen garden, and two cows for milk, all within 10 minutes' walk from St Stephen's Green.
As the 1920s gave way to the 1930s and 1940s, the revolutionaries become the establishment in one generation. Historians will be grateful to Lisa Mulcahy for this clear-sighted portrait of middle-class family life in Dublin in the 20th century, the childhood of her father and his siblings, and later that of her generation. They will also have cause to thank Padraig Mulcahy and a later Richard, for faithfully recording family parties and events with a cine camera. It is one thing to recollect outings in the family's kitchen-dresser-green Fiat station wagon, but how much more poignant it is to see reproduced on jerky and endearingly muddy colour film.
And many viewers must have been fascinated by the 1950s and 1960s "home movies" of the fashion shows of Neilli Mulcahy, a leading fashion designer of the time, and daughter of Dick, held in Lissenfield. Behind the gates opposite the cooper-domed church on Rathmines Road two large families grew up. First the six children of Dick and Min and later the six children of one of their sons, Risteard (the Dad of the title) who became a leading cardiologist and preventative medicine campaigner. The film-maker, Lisa, and her siblings tell the story of their remarkable parents and the break-up of their marriage in the 1970s in a very open way, which might only have been possible because they were talking to their little sister.
Tina Mulcahy, Lisa's eldest sister, reminded us of that which historians often overlook, the social conventions of the day. Speaking of her father Risteard she said: "I think doctors were particular in Ireland at that time . . . they became this person in society made precious by the nuns [in the hospitals run by religious orders] who put them on a pedestal. The women who married them all had big families, fathers who were never there, at weekends they went off and played golf together. It was a "no exit" situation for a woman, she married into it and she knew what she was going to do for the rest of her life . . ." Not much solidarity from the sisters, or Sisters, then.
Of her father's absences, Tina Mulcahy observed, without rancour: "He committed himself so little to his family, his children, his wife, yet everything else he did was [with] total commitment . . ." And her younger sister Barbara took up her theme and added "Yet I feel I was blessed - being part of that place [Lissenfield]."
The Lissenfield housekeeper Maggie O'Connor saw better than most the central importance of that house. "Everyone came to the kitchen, you weren't in the house at all if you weren't in the kitchen."
In the end there was some room for the Holy Spirit, but not the way the nuns at the convent dances sought it. It manifested itself in Risteard's search for reconciliation with his father's enemies, and his own children's very strong feelings for both separated parents. Even so, when it comes to having your children discuss your frailties on TV, rather you than me, doctor . . .
EAMON Dunphy's battle with objectivity (he wins most of the time) was echoed by Pete Postlethwaite's portrayal of an ex-convict trying to go straight on his release from prison. The Sins, a seven-part BBC1 drama series began on Tuesday. If lugubriousness was an Olympic sport, Postlethwaite would win gold every time. The trouble is that crime pays. His wife Gloria tells him; "You've got to back on the rob . . . the family need certain things." But he knows he is capable of more. He's got a daughter at college. "I've had a letter published in the Daily Telegraph" he tells his felon friends in his retirement-from-thieving speech.
But the real trouble lies in the clunky dramatic devices under which which this comic morality tale is already staggering. The first episode was called Pride so we must expect the other deadly sins to follow. His daughters have names such as Hope and Dolores and one is even called Chastity, so we know what's going to happen to her. I fear that the presence of that outrageous old scene-stealer Frank Finlay as an undertaker and the usually excellent Geraldine James as the erstwhile crook's glamour-puss wife is not going to rescue it and us from the tedium which lies ahead . . . the dialogue has more wood in it than Finlay's coffins.
Still the pub where the villains drink is called the Sir Robert Peel. I don't suppose the nuns would find much evidence of the Holy Spirit there either.
Kieran Fagan can be contacted at kfagan@irish-times.ie