Overwhelming feedback from my RTE documentary

I’ve been overwhelmed by the feedback to my documentary From Belief to Unbelief. Here, in no particular order, is an arbitrary selection of just some of the feedback. Sorry if I haven’t included yours hear. I just wanted to give a flavour.

  • ‘Just listened to documentary.  I was knocked out by it.  I was shaken when it was over.  It was a powerful piece of work, no blame, no shame, just fact.’ – BF
  • ‘A five star rating. It is brilliant’ – EM
  • ‘I stumbled across your documentary on the RTE website. Your programme was very evocative, speaking of a time and a mental space that does not exist any more and looking back now can seem unreal. Yet it was a time that went a long way to shaping me (for good and bad) into what I am now.’ JG
  • ‘I thought it was excellent. Very insightful. Interesting people, each in their own way. Couldn’t be critical of the choices made by anyone!’ NC
  • ‘I was truly moved by your radio doc. Thank you. Taken back through time to people, places and even feelings almost forgotten. Actually not forgotten, just dormant! Great job!’ – DM
  • ‘Wonderful!’ – TL
  • ‘Excellent documentary’ – CC
  • ‘Brought back many rich memories. Missed out on how much being a Marist enriched my life’ OC
  • ‘a beautiful documentary, very honest – about yourselves and the Marists. Gentle without being ‘soft’’. ‘You should be very proud as it is exceptional work. Very thoughtful and non-threatening which I appreciate. Exceptional work I must say. Very moving.’ – AM
  • ‘It gave me goose-bumps.  It brought back so many memories – not of the priesthood obviously,  but the rest –  the atmosphere, the Salve Regina, the rules, timetables, the rituals, being told what to think – were all part of my boarding school  experience so it might as well have been a novitiate.’ MO
  • ‘I really liked it! I will forward it my friends, believers and unbelievers alike.’ – CD
  • ‘It’s wonderful, so interesting, so seamlessly constructed and love the special effects. Presume you know it’s one of RTE’s most listened to?’ PO


Norah Casey The Meaning of Life

That was a very moving final episode of the current series of Gay Byrne’s (RTE 1 television ) The Meaning of Life in which Gaybo interviewed Norah Casey, one year after the sad and sudden death of her beloved husband. It was touching, sad, honest, true and insightful, marred only by Gaybo’s cultural conditioning within Catholicism and seeming inability to transcend that limited and relatively recent (loopy) worldview. However, he remains a master of his broadcasting craft, verging on the peerless in fact. And I’m pretty sure I saw his eyes well up too at the raw grief evident still of Norah’s sad loss. It is true that Catholicism offers tools to help deal with grief – whether rattling off rosaries like a mantra, or the music and colour of the requiem mass. It’s just a pity that it often seems to hijack the human inevitability of death, as if the Catholic way is the only language of handling death when it clearly isn’t. And when, as is the case now, increasing numbers of people no longer believe in Catholic dogmas – happily – it can leave people floundering for an alternative rite of passage which is meaningful for post-Christians/unbelievers. True, humanists offer secular funeral services but as yet not so many people know about these. And Catholics have the advantage of dry/warm/sheltered church buildings in which to hold ceremonies for the bereaved. I wonder if they are sufficiently ‘catholic/universal’ to allow non-Catholics or former Catholics to shelter there from the elements on cold, rainy days to conduct secular funerals for bereaved fellow humans? Finally, Gaybo mentioned he’d never been present at anyone’s death and Norah seemed surprised. I was lucky/privileged enough to be present at the death of my father and my father-in-law, profound experiences both. Regardless of one’s religious/secular worldview, death is the one thing that unites us all. Each of us must die. How appalling that some religious people exclude people, even in death. It is not long ago that unbaptized infants could not be buried in ‘consecrated’ cemeteries and when crazy religious thinking  deemed such infants left to fester in ‘Limbo’. What unmitigated nonsense was taught to us and we, with our brains parked somewhere other than inside our heads, believed such waffle.