Nuala ofaolain documentary hypothesis

Irish Independent, March 24, 2012

Last Monday night’s Nuala was the third documentary about the late Nuala O’Faolain that RTE1 has screened in the past six years.

That makes it at least one too many, and though in substance and general interest this new film was vastly superior to its predecessors, it suffered from the same basic problem as the others.

“Unearned poignancy” was the phrase I had used to describe the woefully indulgent, if unintentionally revealing, 2006 ‘Flesh and Blood’ documentary, in which the journalist and memoirist came across as so self-absbored it was as if no one else had ever suffered from a dysfunctional childhood or had endured an unhappy adulthood – which, after a certain age, is usually of one’s own making.

Of the 2009 Cloch le Carn tribute, screened eighteen months after her death, I wrote at the time that it was undermined by its determination “to smother her in a shroud of sainthood”, which is precisely the aura that Marian