Badtelly – Paul Williams's 'Badfellas' (RTÉ TV)

Reviewed by Mícheál Mac Donncha

RTÉ has now joined TV3, The Sunday World and the News of the World in its expansive and sensationalist coverage of ‘gangland’ crime. The common link is Paul Williams, formerly of the Sunday World and now one of Bertie Ahern’s fellow ‘muppets in the cupboard’ in the News of the World.

Williams’s latest work of fantasy was the first episode of ‘Badfellas’. The main point of the programme was to try to convince the Irish public that the IRA was to blame for the increase in armed crime in the 26 Counties from the early 1970s onwards. The central plot of this historical fiction is that the ‘ordinary decent criminals’ got the idea of armed robberies from Saor Éire (a shadowy and short-lived splinter group) and the IRA; the Government and Garda were too busy combating the IRA to notice; and the result is today’s corpse-strewn, drug-ridden criminal landscape.

The clue to what’s at the back of this hogwash is in the ‘eminent’ figures rolled out to help make Williams’s case. These included former Justice Minister and political boss of the Garda ‘Heavy Gang’, Paddy Cooney, and Progressive Democrats founder and another former Justice Minister, Dessie O’Malley. In their eyes, the IRA were always criminals, North and South, and they would do and say anything to obscure the political causes of the conflict and the political motivation of republicans.

The real origin of armed crime in the 26 Counties was only hinted at in the programme. As with other Western consumer societies, Ireland went through major social and economic changes in the 1970s and 1980s. An increase in violent crime was part of that change, especially after the rise of the drugs trade.

The instance of armed robberies in England also increased greatly in this period. Were criminals in Manchester and London – or Philadelphia, for that matter – imitating the IRA?

The whole theory is absurd and RTÉ is a disgrace to lend it credence by giving Williams and his ilk such an extensive and uncontested platform to spout it.

Subsequent episodes of the series covered already well-trodden ground, describing the rise and fall of the various gangs.

The episode on drugs was notable for completely ignoring the fight-back by communities in Dublin in the form of the Concerned Parents Against Drugs, a grassroots movement that became necessary because the Government and the gardaí totally neglected those communities.

But the shallow approach was most clearly seen in the episode on Limerick when Dessie O’Malley reappeared. The destruction of working-class communities by the gangs was described but O’Malley was able to place the blame on Limerick Corporation and was never challenged on the abject neglect of successive Governments of which he was a member.

This is not surprising given the fact that the series was made by the former Workers' Party RTÉ producer Gerry Gregg, the same one who in 2001 produced a four-hour series for RTÉ on the political career of Dessie O’Malley, all but making the case for his canonisation.