Liveline, RTÉ Radio 1
Pick of the Week, Radio 4
Sometimes you’d rather put your hands over your ears because the stories are so horrific.
The recent O’Toole inquiry – a 700-page scoping report on past sexual abuse in schools run by religious orders in the Republic of Ireland – makes for harrowing reading.
There’s so much, it’s hard to know where to start. Just download it and search through it, advised Joe Duffy on Liveline.
Sickening stories poured out of the radio. It might have been easier to turn off.
“It’s not historical; it’s today, it’s tomorrow,” said one caller – it never goes away.
Liveline featured stories of primary school children and vulnerable disabled children. They talked about the culture of physical violence and humiliation – those of us of a certain age can remember the cane, the dowel rail and the hard slap across the face.
Sometimes you’d rather put your hands over your ears because the stories are so horrific
Caller Michael refused to go to school.
“I was born with a thing called borderline mental handicap, so you had a dunce hat on your desk all day,” he told Joe Duffy.
His refusal to attend meant he was sent to an industrial school.
He talked about “massive beatings” and how one young fella was marched by the ear the length of the canteen before having his head smashed off a sink – the sink broke and there was blood everywhere. He never saw him again.
People mourned the powerless children they were; what they suffered and witnessed… grim, if essential listening.
Heart-warming, then, to turn to a story of pure joy.
Pick of the Week featured Barbara Mladek, who has changed her name to Mama Hen by deed poll.
She runs a hen rescue centre in Northern Ireland and we heard from her on Farming Today.
“She has restored my faith in humanity,” said one listener.
Barbara was gifted her first four hens and four turned to eight, then to 20, and then she got her first rescue hens.
“They’re like little Tyrannosaurus Rexes but also like your granny,” she said.
“When you see them making their first nests when they come out of the commercial farms and you hear them ‘purring with happiness’, or when they take their first proper dust bath or their first sunbathe...”
She left a proper job in a bank for her hens: “I’ve no money, I’m skint. I wouldn’t go back to it,” she said.
Here’s to the simple joy of little brown hens.