A destructive force

A lonely Daire O'Brien talks sport; Mary T O'Connor gets a hard time for her exposé
of bad behaviour in the Garda; Frame Two looks at the brutal reign of Ceausescu
and An Bathadh Mór reminds us of a hurricane in the west of Ireland in 1927

It is a number of years since the European Union, in its wisdom, introduced a tracking device into the cabs of long distance truck drivers to regulate their hours and prevent them from falling asleep at the wheel.

Since then, Europe hasn't exactly been stingy in the introduction of directives, but thankfully has overlooked the working hours of television presenters, or Setanta Sports would be in the dock over the case of Daire O'Brien. Daire O'Brien is the sole presenter of The Hub (Setanta Sports, different times, most nights). Indeed, although Daire is occasionally joined by people like Trevor Brennan, at times you suspect that he is the only person present in the whole building as he analyses, in a no-nonsense way, the sporting events of the day. Occasionally he appears to speak on the phone with experts like Lou Macari, but this may be a fake ploy, with ventriloquism being among Mr O'Brien's many talents, so that – rather like Kavanagh's Weekly – the whole thing is done by one man under different guises.

The Hub is as close to radio as television can get. However, while sports radio programmes like RTÉ's Sportscall mainly consist of Des Cahill dealing with a selection of permanently outraged callers, (some of whom may or may not have been previous certified), for those interested in sport, The Hub makes for informed and intelligent viewing or – if you simply prefer to close your eyes – listening.

Closing your eyes has been part and parcel of working within numerous big organisations in Ireland with an "all for one and one for all" mentality. This mentality meant that, at one stage, the most hated Norbetine priest within the Norbetine order itself was not the child molester Brendan Smyth, but the honourable whistleblower Fr Bruno Mulvihill, who wound up ostracised.

I'm sure that Mary T O'Connor won't suffer as bad a fate for writing On The Beat – her exposé of life as a Ban Garda. Her revelations of prejudice against certain minority groups are not on the same scale as other revelations about the force that have emerged, but her appearance on The Late Late Show (Friday, 9.30pm) was interesting for the clash between new and old Irelands. The "old" was represented by the Garda who phoned to rebuke her for publicly discussing her experience of being sexual harassed by a male guard who decided to pleasure himself while in a squad car with her. The irate caller believed that breaking this code of silence was "a cheap story". The audience quite obviously believed that the caller was a fossil. It was an interesting clash of cultures, neither of which intends to go away, you know.

As if to show that big organisations can still produce great individuals, she was followed on The Late Late Show by Fr Shay Cullen, who continues to do extraordinary and dangerous work on behalf of street children in the Philippines. He was highlighting the practice of young children being locked up in adult jails in the Philippines – where they are often raped while forced to share packed cells with paedophiles – until their parents find money to bribe police to release them. It was an interesting lesson in perspective, when we see how minor corruption is in Ireland in comparison to many states, and just why we need to stop brandying about ridiculous comparisons with people who suffered under Nazi regimes. Indeed I recently recall county councillors using the Nazi metaphor in connection to some minor boundary dispute between Waterford and Kilkenny.

People wanting to actually understand life under a totalitarian regime should have watched Frame Two: The King of Communism (RTÉ 2, Sunday, 8pm) an account of the surreal and brutal reign of Nicolae Ceausescu, who tormented the people of Romania until they lost the heart to even cheer on forced marches past his balcony. Ceausescu merely relayed the sound of cheering on loudspeakers over their silent footsteps until their silence turned to boos and they gave him a Christmas to remember. This reminder of the true horror of his reign might also temporarily halt the other Irish cliché about every new public project being a Ceausescueque monument. Whatever else it taught us about dictators with grandiose notions, it showed that they drink Bass in Fagan's of Drumcondra.

Finally An Báthadh Mór (The Great Drowning) on TG4 on Saturday at 9.05pm was an excellent (if slightly over-extended) documentary about the hurricane which struck the West of Ireland in 1927, killing 45 fishermen from small communities like the Inishkea Islands off Mayo. Made by Vertigo Films, it combines archive footage with re-enactments and interviews with people who were children back then. In the scale of the hurricanes today it seems a minor storm, but it wiped out the future hopes of several villages who saw the next generation snatched from them. It was a story of courage, not just from those who survived the ordeal, but the everyday courage of men who took to the seas in the evenings in small rowing boats to feed their families. It was memorable television, made more moving by the quiet dignity with which people spoke of the loss not just of fathers and uncles but of the homes they had to abandon, when – three years after the drownings, the people of the Inishkeas left the islands forever.