States of Fear: (RTE 1, Tuesday)
Panorama: (BBC 1, Monday)
New Britain on the Couch: (Channel 4, Sunday)
If we were thinking smugly that institutionalised child abuse is past history in the Republic, the third and final part of States of Fear gave us a powerful reality check. The appalling systematic rape of children while in the care of the State, which paid the religious orders to do the State's work, was enabled by a culture of secrecy, an irrational instinct to protect the Catholic church and an unwillingness to believe children. All three of these factors continue to fester, the programme argued, citing dozens of investigative reports into childcare facilities which the State has refused to make public to this very day.
The toxic secrecy that destroyed so many young lives is continuing into the 1990s. Among the suppressed information, are two crucial chapters in a report on Madonna House, which show that authorities failed to take any effective action over staff concerns and children's complaints. As The Irish Times reported on Thursday, the suppressed sections of the report revealed beatings, humiliation and sexual assaults on children by a small number of staff. The rainbow coalition refused to publish the report in 1996, a mere three years ago.
The Australian and Canadian governments have long since faced reality and dealt with the issues raised by abuse by establishing commissions to investigate. The actions were inspired by TV documentaries, a pattern now being repeated in the Republic. The Government's announcement, timed shortly before States of Fear was broadcast on Tuesday, that it was setting up a truth commission, will not cure toxic secrecy overnight and it has the feeling of media-inspired sticking plaster about it. But what the announcement does clearly prove is that States of Fear was more than a TV documentary series - it was a cultural event.
Radio and newspapers all picked up on the issues raised by the series, while helplines took hundreds of calls from distressed victims, now adults. Many viewers saw their own misery on the screen, and reacted with the outrage of victims who finally see their suffering validated. As this happened, more victims poured forth to tell their stories on radio. It has been like the lancing of an infected wound.
None of this would have been possible without Mary Raftery and her team, who deserve every award going for their work on States of Fear. The series was so powerful not just because it exposed abuse - other Irish documentaries, such as Dear Daughter, have done this - but because it communicated a very complex social and legal area in a way that people could understand. The research which Raftery and her team conducted was exhaustive and they had mountains of material to sift through. They focused not on one institution, but on an entire system. They heard many terrible personal stories from former child inmates of these institutions. But in the end, they had to hone and target their material in order to make the series digestible, and this they did with superior ability.
For example, in the final programme, which before examining Madonna House, looked at St Patrick's in Kilkenny, Raftery chose to use one man's story to illustrate the horrific buggery inflicted on many boys by a man currently serving a prison sentence. This adult victim told of how he was "spoiled" emotionally and physically, to the extent that he regarded himself as suitable for no other career than as rent boy, after he left St Patrick's for London. Raftery interspersed the man's personal story with commentary by well-briefed experts who conveyed complex information in simple, understandable language. In this way, the man's story not only had a context, but it also made him appear to speak for hundreds of others. A similar intelligence was working in Raftery's decision to highlight the involvement of Sister Stanislaus Kennedy in the social services complex which surrounded St Patrick's. For many people, Sister Stan is the friendly face of the religious, with her high-profile media role. If she could have turned a blind eye, then so could anyone. Raftery presented certain facts in relation to Sister Stan: she was present in the general area at the time of the offences, she heard complaints from an employee who subsequently resigned and, as recently as 1995, she admitted to Gardai that she suspected that child sexual abuse was occurring at St Patrick's. Sister Stan refused to give her point of view to States of Fear, but did agree to be interviewed the following day on Morning Ireland, when David Hanley gave her a grilling, showing the advantage of a public service radio and TV network where issues can be followed through in a consistent manner.
WE care more about money, status and power than we do about children, and abuse can be more subtle than beating, raping and starving. The emotional abuse of children, by parents individually and by society in general, was the subject of two disturbing programmes, New Britain on the Couch and Panorama: Child-snatching. New Britain on the Couch chillingly demonstrated how parents are bringing up their children to be employees capable of competition, but not fulfilment. Panorama made the viewer eyewitness to an actual child-snatching and showed how parents caught up on power-struggles will put their own obsession to win over their children's welfare. Oliver James, a British psychologist with a down-to-earth new man way of communicating, analyses what is sick and dysfunctional about British society in New Britain on the Couch, and everything he says applies to the Republic as well. The first programme in the series looked at the incredible pressure placed on young people by their parents and society in general to succeed, and how that pressure is translating directly into an epidemic of depression. One in five people are depressed or at least show some of the symptoms of depression. One in 20 people are on antidepressants, but young people - whose depression tends to be ignored - are self-medicating with alcohol and ecstasy. In a week when we also learned that Irish young men have the highest suicide rate in the world, the programme was apt viewing.
Oliver James followed the progress of four British male students at Dulwich College through their exams. The three who did extremely well were still not content with their performances and took little joy in their achievements. They saw the world as a place of intense competition where the only way to be fulfilled was to be the best - and even that wasn't good enough. The programme also profiled a young woman -an animator, with a good salary, two homes and a wonderful boyfriend - who was still miserable and on Prozac. From early childhood, she told us, her accomplishments were never good enough to please her mother. Today, she has achieved success, but still feels miserable because her fear of failure has turned her into an obsessive perfectionist. Tomorrow's programme will look at another contributor towards depression: the media. Should be interesting.
MARY Banotti, MEP, a European expert on child-snatching, was among the contributors to the Panorama documentary, in which she described the phenomenon as a "a mixture of love, hate, fear and revenge". Surprisingly, there has been no media reaction to her statement that, in situations where seeking redress through the Hague Convention does not result in the return of their children, she can understand why parents would take matters into their own hands and hire private detectives to snatch their children back. As Panorama revealed, some of these detectives are armed, and abduct children using cunning and force.
All over the world, marriages between people of different nationalities are resulting in corrosive divorces in which the children are snatched forcibly from country to country, in games of emotional ping-pong. The Hague Convention is supposed to protect parents who have custody of their children from having those children spirited away by the other non-custodial parent. But often this law does not work and some parents call it "The Vague Convention".
Panorama profiled one British father, Simon McNicholas, who fell in love with a Spanish lounge singer, Reyes, with whom he had a son, Matthew, now aged two. Matthew has lived with his father all his life, and is incredibly close to him. Matthew's mother complained, with stunning immaturity, that father and son were too close and that she couldn't get a look in. She and Simon broke up and she returned to Spain, whisking Matthew away from his father with no warning. The devastated father has been battling through the courts to get his son back, but the red tape is so thick that it could take months or years.
Panorama followed the father to Spain where he spent 10 days trying to talk sense with Matthew's mother. The programme-makers met Reyes's parents, who said that they thought Reyes was wrong to take Matthew and that their grandson should be living with his father in England. We also watched as Reyes allowed her former partner to meet his son in a public playground for the first time in three months. Matthew clung to his father and, when his parents began to argue, Matthew pushed his mother away, saying: "My Daddy - mine. Mummy, stop it. Go away - go!" It was utterly heart-rending viewing. Eventually, the father had enough and, convinced that he was doing the best for his son, he snatched the child back and returned to the UK, with us - the Panorama viewers - as witnesses. It was hard to resist the feeling that the father had done the right thing, but if the programme had been made from the mother's point of view, would we have felt differently? In documentaries, as in marriage break-ups, it's impossible to get an unbiased view.
Eddie Holt is on leave.