Charity vaulteth itself

Charity Queens squints through the flashing cameras at Ireland's most generous fashionistas, while Townlands takes a look at the growing popularity of cricket

Giving money to charity is a bit like having sex. You don't need to dress up to do it, but for a certain type of person, it just wouldn't be as much fun unless you were wearing your best party frock, and there were at least a few people watching. Tuesday saw the screening of the second and final part of Charity Queens (RTÉ1, 10pm), a behind-the-scenes look at the work of Caroline Downey, Tara O'Connor, Deirdre Kelly and others in the charity business. And a business it certainly is. It has to be run efficiently to maximise the monies raised for a succession of excellent causes.

With each of the organisers, there was a sense that the charity for which they were fundraising meant a great deal to them. However, for the narrow pool of guests they were chasing, the charity seemed fairly peripheral to an endless whirl of party frocks, goodie-bags and a chance of some good old-fashioned bitching among friends.

Looking at the lunches for ladies in the blandly chic Four Seasons Hotel, what struck me most wasn't the opulence of this particular stratum of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, but the rather mind-numbingly boring, 1950s feel of the whole thing. Horn-rim glasses and harbingers of the beehive may not have been in evidence, but the women who boarded the contraceptive train to Belfast four decades ago may shake their heads as they look at this social class of Irish women for whom gaining a sense of worth and empowerment appears still to come from being photographed for the social pages of glossy magazines.

There are now three or four social charity events every week competing for the credit cards for the elite. In truth, if a whole caste of people decides to use charity events as their primary socialising vehicle, then it can be argued persuasively that a lot of good causes would be poorer without the rich competing in this way for the attention and kudos of their peers. And perhaps the programme might have served the organisers better by focusing more on the causes, like Angels Quest, who provide respite care for special needs children. But in the end, it looked at a rather ludicrous and shallow world, where nobody seemed all that real or all that bothered once the lightbulbs were flashing. It's a world that was rather set up as a sitting duck in Charity Queens, although someone like Liam Cunningham spoke passionately about the good that can be done by the money raised.

My favourite charity organiser was the late, great Northern Ireland rally motorcyclist Joey Dunlop, who regularly filled up a container truck of donations from his neighbours and admirers for a Romanian orphanage and drove it there himself without fuss, sleeping in the cab. Nobody, however, called him a charity queen, or if they did, one suspects that they never lived to tell the tale.

One can give to charity, have sex and even drive a rally motorcycle in a party frock, but I definitely think you would have to draw the line at playing cricket in one. Some years ago, the poet Conor O'Callaghan wrote a brilliant essay about trying to organise a cricket team in Dundalk, where he was warned to declare for nought by certain gentlemen more familiar with knee-caps than wickets who deemed it too British.

The interesting series Townlands (RTÉ1, Wednesday, 7pm) showed that cricket is now actually one of the most international sports in Ireland today, with the Civic Service Cricket Club in Dublin's Phoenix Park enjoying a new lease of life thanks to the influx of migrant batsmen and bowlers from India, Sri Lanka and myriad other countries. Like the first programme in the series, which was about the Doolin Coast and Cliff Rescue Team, it made for engaging and unshowy viewing.