If youth knew; if age could

RTÉ dwells on Ireland's Catholic past in Altered State; returns to some harrowing stories based in Crumlin hospital and allows a bunch of children to interview famous musicians. By Dermot Bolger

In any society, anywhere in the world, farmers are the least likely people to get divorced. For them, having to share a marital bed in frozen silence and discord is far preferable to having to share out the family farm. Indeed in Ireland – where for several decades men got married later in life than anywhere else – it often took a minor miracle to persuade them to marry at all. Therefore in the 1980s it was always going to take a far more street-wise political operator than the naïve Garret Fitzgerald to persuade them to contemplate the possibility of divorce. Religious belief certainly played its part in the defeat of Garret's constitutional crusade, but in the end, it wasn't so much the fear of losing their souls as losing their fields.

The Divorce Referendum was just one of the moral struggles from that most surreal decade – the 1980s – featured on RTÉ's new three-part series Altered State (RTÉ1, Tuesday, 11.15pm). As far as I know, RTÉ doesn't plan to publish a book to accompany the series, which is just as well – it is already a crowded marketplace out there, from Goodbye to Catholic Ireland by Mary Kenny (an excellent interviewee on Altered State) to Colum Kenny's just published Moments that Changed Us. Indeed, future historians may well decided that Catholic Ireland died from an acute dose of over-analysis. With that said, since the success of Reeling in the Years, RTÉ has realised that it is sitting on a treasure trove of old archival footage. And that, by mixing the old material with contemporary interviews with politicians and churchmen, it can make for bizarre and uncomfortable viewing; rather like finding old family home movies and saying "that couldn't possibly be us".

I mean, that couldn't possibly be Mary Harney voting against a bill to make condoms available in a limited way, could it? Or Laois couldn't possibly have elected a politician like Oliver J Flanagan, who came out with lines like "The government may take its legal advice from the attorney general, but I take my legal advice from the word of God". Indeed, watching the country tear itself asunder over the first abortion referendum, with rational voices warning that its flawed wording was always going to cause problems, it is amazing in retrospect how many people – bishops included – decided that they understood the Irish constitution better than the Supreme Court. Altered State lacks a certain narrator and tries to be even-handed in those it interviews. The interviews are hardly inquisitorial, but it is good at allowing a surprising number of people on all sides sufficient rope to hang themselves with their own self-serving words.

This was a week that saw two very different RTÉ programmes focusing on young people. Eye2Eye (RTÉ2, Fridays, 7pm) is a series of concerts for a youth audience who get the chance to meet with and question their musical heroes. This week it kicked off with Mundy – the Kurt Weill of Offaly – whose best songs like 'Gin and Tonic Sky' and 'Drive' mark him out as one of our more intelligent and engaging songwriters. It has nice little video interviews with kids which, if occasionally silly, are part of the natural high-spiritedness of youth.

Moving from that young exuberance made it even harder to watch Return to Our Ladies, (RTÉ1, Monday, 9.30pm) a fly-on-the-wall documentary series filmed in Our Lady's Hospital in Crumlin. This is a follow-on from the first series, which was filmed two years ago, and although there have been new surgery and outpatients buildings opened since then, much of the hospital still dates from the 1950s with personal space and privacy at a premium amid the constant danger of accidental cross-infection. The programme opened with a happy ending story from the previous series. Two years ago, three-year-old Michael Harty from Limerick was in intensive care and given little hope in his battle with meningitis. Today he is a fully recovered and perfectly healthy kid, full of life and mischief. The fate of other children who were featured is less certain, with one child, Matthew, left paralysed from the neck down after being infected with this same terrible illness as a baby. To be humanly honest, after several minutes of watching this beautiful child, who lives in the intensive care unit of Our Lady's and is dependant on a ventilator, I was so upset that I couldn't watch anymore. I switched if off with no small amount of guilt, knowing that such avoidance is not an option for a great many parents who are constantly faced with coping with the reality and aftermath of such illnesses.

Finally it is always good to see an Irish director making strides and therefore it was nice to see the multi-talented playwright (The Buddhist of Castleknock), radio playwright and theatre and television director, Jim O'Hanlon, adding the excellently directed two part thriller Waking The Dead (BBC1, Sunday and Monday night) to his already impressive list of achievements, with the extra Irish interest for a fine script by fellow Dubliner Declan Croghan.