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RTÉ’s Once in a Lifetime Season Explores Changing Attitudes To Death
29 Oct 2014 :
'One Million Dubliners'
This week, RTÉ launches a new season of programmes on RTÉ One which will explore aspects of - and attitudes towards - death in today's Ireland.

The series of programming, entitled 'Once in a Lifetime' looks at the subject from a range of perspectives, including body donation, death notices and the fascinating Glasnevin cemetery. Death and the afterlife also feature in returning series ‘Joe Duffy’s Spirit Level’.

The season begins this Thursday 30 October, at 10.15pm, on RTÉ One with a two-part series, ‘A Parting Gift’, produced by Loose Horse Productions, which tells the story of the Body Donation Programme at Trinity College, Dublin. Filmed over 18 months, with unprecedented access, it focuses on 'the gift' of body donation: an act of great generosity that contributes to world-class medical education, research and scientific endeavour. The documentary captures different perspectives on the body donation, including the donors themselves and their loved ones, whose grief and funeral rites are suspended during the two years or so when a body is entrusted to Trinity; the staff of the Anatomy Department, who receive and prepare remains and make sure that what could easily be just a clinical process remains also a respectful and human one; and the medical students, past and present, who benefit from a donor’s parting gift.

In ‘Guess Who’s Dead’, produced by Loose Horse Productions, on Thursday 13th November at 10.15pm on RTÉ One, Ardal O’Hanlon explores the changing world of Irish death notices, which remain a simple touchstone for family, friends and communal mourning. Death notices, whether in the newspaper, on local radio or online, reveal a uniquely ingrained cultural hunger for the bare facts of a death – a social roadmap for our public grief and sympathy. They are is also a symbol of Ireland's healthy attitude towards death.

‘Joe Duffy’s Spirit Level’, produced in-house by RTÉ, returns to RTÉ One on Sunday, 16th November, at 5.45pm, for a series of six programmes, reflecting on religion, spirituality and ethics in today’s Ireland, through a mixture of conversation, interviews, features and music. To fit in with the 'Once in a Lifetime' season, the first programme explores contemporary ideas and beliefs about death and the afterlife.

RTÉ One will also air the highly-acclaimed ‘One Million Dubliners’, produced by Underground Films and winner of the Best Documentary Feature prize at this year’s Galway Film Fleadh. This deeply moving and inspiring film explores the life stories - and death stories - surrounding Ireland’s largest and most famous resting place, Glasnevin cemetery, through the eyes and experience of some of the people most closely connected with the place (Keep an eye on IFTN for an interview with director Aoife Kelleher, coming soon).

Commenting on the 'Once in a Lifetime' season, Roger Childs, Genre Head, Religious Programming on RTÉ, said: ‘Ireland has long had a particular talent for handling death: a unique matrix of traditions, beliefs and cultural practices that help people to face their own mortality and other people’s, and to prepare for whatever lies beyond. Now, though, some of those ideas and attitudes are shifting, which makes it an especially interesting time, during what is traditionally seen as the month of All Souls, to explore various aspects of the Irish way of death – an event that will happen to us all, once in a lifetime.’





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