As is only proper, Memorial – The Story of HIV/Aids in Ireland (RTÉ One, Thursday, 10.15pm), makes for harrowing viewing. This empathetic yet unsentimental documentary chronicles the arrival of HIV to early 1980s Ireland – a country stuck in the sexual dark ages and thus unable to mobilise effectively against a virus that devastated the gay community as well as causing imaginable loss among intravenous drug users and haemophiliacs treated with contaminated blood products.
Memorial was filmed in the months before the unveiling last December of a monument in Dublin’s Phoenix Park dedicated to all the lives affected by Aids. One of those who campaigned for the State to publicly acknowledge the suffering caused by HIV was campaigner Tonie Walsh, who as a young gay man the 1980s saw the lights go out again and again across his community as Aids cut a devastating path.
“I always liken the Aids pandemic to a war,” Walsh says. “I made a mental note of all the people I’d lost. And at one point, I was able to count to 43, the number I knew who had died from Aids.”
Because Aids was in some cases spread by sexual contact, sufferers were in many instances regarded as having visited shame on Catholic Ireland and bringing the illness upon themselves. They were often left to die alone. The Aids ward at St James’s Hospital, Dublin, was a place of immense suffering and trauma, recalls Breda Gahan, a nurse who tended to the sick and dying.
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“It was killing everybody on the Aids unit,” Gahan says “As a nurse and a midwife, I’d been used to helping people get better. I certainly wasn’t used to people my own age, early 20s and a little older, getting sick and dying. Looking back now, I really think we needed counselling ourselves. It was hard to take.”
All of the testimonies are devastating but one of the most painful is by Colm Walsh – a haemophiliac like his bother Brendan. Injected with a bad batch of blood plasma in 1982, Colm contracted hepatitis C while Brendan developed Aids.
“These were dark, dark days,” says Brian O’Mahony of the Irish Haemophilia Society. “[There were] major deficits in the attitude of doctors. There was a paternalistic culture. You didn’t question doctors.”
The disease was a boogieman – feared but poorly understood, and regarded as not quite of this world. That was the experience of HIV-positive trans woman Rebecca Tallon de Havilland when she received her diagnosis: “That couldn’t be me. I come from Ranelagh. Things like that don’t happen to people like me. When someone tells you that, your world ends.”
Memorial concludes with then-taoiseach Leo Varadkar unveiling the Phoenix Park monument by Anaisa Franco and Michael R DiCarlo. For those whose lives were destroyed by Aids, it is too little too late. But for Tonie Walsh it is important that they be remembered – and this new sculpture will, he hopes, go someway towards achieving that.
“There was a relentless quality to the destruction and death around it,” he says in a moving coda to a powerful film. “Everyone we lost to [HIV] – we owe it to their memory to keep them alive.”
