[Saturday March 17. Channel 4. 10.30. The Comic…]

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Saturday March 17. Channel 4. 10.30. The Comic Strip Presents ... The Beat Generation, where part time hipster Desmond invites angry young men and underground armed Sunday March 18 ITV. 10.00pm. Spitting Images. Talk is that the caricature show might be banned - it's a little irreverent Sunday March 18. BBC2. One Pair of eyes: Nationality. Uncertain. About exiled Czech writer Zdena Tomin. Tomin came to Britain in 1980 with her husband Julius and their two sons. In Czechoslovakia, she had been a spokeswoman for the Nine months later the government of Czechoslovakia stripped the family of their citizenship. The documentary contains unique clandestine film of Prague during the Russian invasion of 1968, smuggled out of the country. Sunday March 18: BBC2. Wales! Wales? The years leading up to the miners' lockout of 1926 and the decade of depression which followed are examined in 'Bitter, Broken Bread' ', the fourth film in the series which takes its title from the pen of Monday March 19. BBC2: Horizon: Prisoners of Incest. About the research of a team at the Hospitai for Sick Children at Monday March 19, BBC1. Panorama: America's other election. Panorama reporter Jeremy Paxman looks at El Salvador. Salvadoreans go to the polls next weekend to elect a new president against a background of a civil war which has now claimed 30,000 lives. Reagan plans to give El Salvador's bloody regime $8 billion in economic aid. The purpose of the election is to try to justify US policy as a "defence of democracy" Monday March 19. BBC2 The Stateless Nations: Belgim's Warring Tribes. Not so long ago the Flemings were the poorer community - Dutch-speaking peasants. The French-speaking Walloons dominated bourgeois Brussels and the industrial Bomb!

Fighter pamphlet 10p 10p plus postage from 214 Sickert Court, London N1 2SY. socialist, and his brother Tom O'Flaherty was in the American Trotskyist movement in the 1930s).

The terrible disillusionment and the internecine splits and squabbles of the defeated clandestine Republican underground are encountered as he seeks collaborators for his job of revenge. One of them talks about his plan of 'a year ago' to set off bombs in England during the General Strike and thus foment civil war, which would be to Ireland's advantage.

The book powerfully suggests to me the atmosphere of anti-climax and of disappointment with the long revolutionary exertions and struggles which had led to nothing better than the bourgeois Free State. It was one stage further on from the indignation with which the poet Yeats upbraided the Irish bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie for having let all the traditions . revolutionary opposition and aspirations fall back before a society dominated by miserable money-grubbing. Yeats responding to the general lockout the Dublin employers declared against members of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union 1913.

Romantic

What need you, being come sense, But fumble in a greasy till, And add the halfpence to the pence, And prayer to shivering prayer until You have dried the the bone?

For men were born to pray and save:

Rumantic Ireland's gune, It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet they were of a different kind The names that stilled your childish play.

They have gone like wind, was spun.

And what, God help us, could they save?

Rumantic Ireland's dead and It's with O'Leary in the grave. gone, poets round to his dad's place.

(O'Leary was a Fenian with its puppets of Reagan and Thatcher.

Duckling Somebody once described O'Flaherty as an 'inverted romantic'. In any case, he human rights movement Charter 77. paints society with great realism.

But O'Flaherty's book seems to me overwritten in places, and the mental feverishness and even frenzy with which MacDora sets about his task is unnecessary.

He is presented as a zealot and fanatic acting alone, the classic terrorist acting apart miner-poet Idris Davies. from any mass movement and as substitute for it.

But you didn't need to be a Great Ormona Street. refugee from Dostoevsky to want to kill O'Higgins, and the people who did it most probably weren't.

Artistically the effect of this is to highlight the true general picture of social defeat and prustration which is the backcloth for Michael MacDora's activities in Dublin as small bourgeois Ireland blinks in the light of day, having broken out of its shell. It is the towns along the River Meuse. picture of the revolutionary swan finding itseif a small Since the last war there has bourgeois duckling. tion.

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Socialist Organiser no. 170 March 15 1984 Page 14 ANTHROPOLOGISTS can make speak at meetings. These have