Out in the cold

Modernists battling to open our minds in the 1960s; hosts smoothing over famous Irish murders and sportsmen trundling headfirst down the slopes. By Dermot BolgerJudging by the evidence from Frank Dunlop, elected councillors in the 1980s and early 1990s seem likely to be remembered for a propensity towards bribery. In the more innocent 1970s however, they were mainly noted for a propensity towards moral outrage towards any innovation in the arts, be it in the Project Art Centre (which, judging by some of their comments at the time, appeared to be a hotbed of such evils as devil worship and vegetarianism) or modern abstract art. I am just about old enough to remember the headlines and public debate that greeted the early Rosc exhibitions, organised from the late 1960s on by Michael Scott. They helped let in the light of the outside world into what was a deeply insular artistic world here, in terms of public taste if not necessarily of output – there were always innovative Irish artists working and somehow surviving in the stultifying climate of the time.

Art Lives: Michael Scott: A Changing Man (RTÉ1, Tuesday 10.15pm) explored the complex and decidedly full life of the instigator of Rosc, who was the first utterly unabashed Irish modernistic architect. The fact that the documentary's director, Ciarin Scott, is Scott's daughter, left it open to the possibilities of accusations of bias, but she prudently countered this early on by giving space to some forthright critics of her father's designs for the Abbey Theatre and Busáras. Indeed, even the famous house he designed for himself came in for criticism from his sons who remembered primarily that, for all its modernist stance, it only possessed one fireplace and they froze at night. The fact that his daughter was behind the camera also allowed family members to be frank in remembering his flaws; when they were young, he was often too busy with his public life to be over-concerned with domestic matters. Yet as each child aged, they seemed to enjoy a close relationship with him as adults who could partly inhabit the wider world he loved.

Moving carefully through the decades from his childhood, when the Catholic Church refused his mother a Christian burial on the premise that her death may have been suicide, the documentary built up a picture not just of Scott's career but of Ireland itself during most of the twentieth century. The cold-hearted forces that judged his mother so harshly in death were never slow to oppose her son in life, with John Charles McQuaid and the bullying, visually illiterate Bishop Browne of Galway coming across as true bogeymen who ensured that in an age of frenetic church-building, Scott's firm received only one commission for a tiny but beautiful church in Kerry. That other rock against all progress, Earnest Blythe, also came out badly by insisting that the Abbey be built precisely on the old site, while Scott wanted to create a building three times the size that would open out onto the river. Like many crusading men of his generation, Scott was not open to dialogue and counter argument, and the spirit of the Ireland he moved though seems distant and peculiar to us today. On the evidence of A Changing Man however, the outward-looking spirit of Ireland today would not seem distant and peculiar to him.

Distant and peculiar is very definitely what TG4 is looking for in Ceart's Coir (TG4, Saturday 11.40pm), its series about people hung for murder in the early years of the State. Cathal O'Shannon has so cornered the market for picturesque reconstructions of famous Irish murders that it almost seems odd to see people done to death without his velvet tones commentating. In compensation, Ceart's Coir gives us, among others, the always interesting and dissenting voice of Finglas's John Grundy, who could be the subject of a fascinating documentary himself. This week, he and other commentators looked at the case of Bernard Kirwin, who was hung for the murder of his bullying brother Lawrence in Offaly in 1942. This was a landmark and controversial case because no actual body was found, just a severed torso that could never be identified. Previous programmes have included the famous La Mancha murders in Malahide, which happened back when murders were as novel as modernist architects. The series works from a well-tried format, but each one is well made and highly watchable.

Watchable is not a word I ever used in the past about The Winter Olympics (BBC 2, every evening), which used to pass over my head every four years like those lunar eclipses that are always blocked by the sun. But the moment of revelation came four years ago when life was suspended in the Bolger household so that we could cheer on someone rejoicing in the name of Lord Clifton Wrottesley. He represented Ireland by sliding down an icy slope, nose inches from the ground, on what looked like his mother's ironing board, in an suicidal event called the “skeleton”. There was no ironing done in the Bolger household for months afterwards. This year, Ireland's skeleton representative is Dave Connolly. He has yet to surface at the time of writing, but if you hear cheering from the direction of Drumcondra you'll know he has. There won't be an ironing board safe in Ireland if he wins.

As South Dublin County Council Writer in Residence, Dermot Bolger is in conversation with Paul Durcan and David Norris in Tallaght Library on 2 March. Tickets are free but strictly limited. Information from Tallaght Library on 01 462 0073