Failing to deliver on a childhood promise

TVScope: Home , RTÉ, Thursdays 7pm

TVScope: Home, RTÉ, Thursdays 7pm

Childhood has been described as "a promise that is never kept" and this episode in a six-part series purporting to look at how Ireland has changed over the past 40 years did not deliver on its promise to provide insights into what it was like to be a child in the 1960s.

Instead we had a mish-mash of unidentified and undated archive footage of children interwoven with celebrity commentators' personal reminiscences about their childhoods.

Inevitably these were of the "feel good" variety with Maureen Gaffney and Blaithnaid Ní Chofaigh recalling town and country variations of happy carefree childhoods, roaming at will, secure in the benevolent protection of community communal parenting.

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There were no first-hand accounts from any of the adults who, as children, also roamed freely in the streets of inner Dublin in the 1960s.

There, chronic overcrowding and Dublin Corporation's failure to provide any facilities resulted in children being forced to play on the busy streets, where they were at risk of being killed by traffic or being drowned at the docks.

Sean Moncrieff's jovial recall of "an odd clatter across the head" from his childhood was at odds with the sinister archive clip of the burly teacher displaying the rulers and straps used to discipline children.

It was left to the lone neutral voice of sociologist Prof Tony Fahy to remind us of the reality that in the 1960s harsh physical punishment was routine within the prevailing viewpoint that if children were not disciplined, they were a threat to social order.

The fact that one-third of all children were born to women who already had five children no doubt increased the reliance on punishment in a bid to maintain order.

It was difficult to see the relevance of agony aunt Angela Mc Namara's description of her privileged, upstairs/downstairs childhood, with her governess and lots of happy servants to growing up in the 1960s.

It perhaps served only to show that what has remained constant is that while wealth and privilege may not always guarantee emotional happiness for children, it does provide a buffer from the raw deprivation seen in the archive clip of baby-faced truants interviewed at a Dublin street corner.

A job as a messenger-boy was the height of what they dared to hope for.

There was, the sociologist reminded us, a lot of danger for children in the 1960s, not only from the institutionalised brutality against them but also in the rigid control of authorities and Church which left them cowering and lacking in self-confidence.

It is hard now to imagine how their modest forms of rebellion of long hair and mini skirts created greater unease then anything young people do today.

Children growing up today may have lost the degree of freedom described in the sanitised trips down nostalgia lane but what they have gained in confidence surely outweighs this.