Once in a Lifetime Season Explores Changing Attitudes To Dea

Once in a Lifetime Season Explores Changing Attitudes To Death 21 October 2014: RT today announced a new season of programmes on RT One which will explore aspects of - and attitudes towards - death in todays Ireland.

The month-long 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 next Thursday, 30 October, at 10.15pm, on RT One with a two-part series, A Parting Gift, 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. The films encompass science and medical history, cultural attitudes towards death and bereavement and the big questions of mortality and spirituality.

In Guess Who's Dead, on Thursday 13th November, at 10.15pm, on RT One, Ardal O'Hanlon explores the changing world of Irish death notices, which remain a simple touchstone for family, friends and communal mourning. Ireland has an obsession with death notices: in the newspaper, on local radio or online. Its a uniquely ingrained cultural hunger for the bare facts of a death a social roadmap for our public grief and sympathy. The death notice is also a symbol of Irelands healthy attitude towards death (as long as its someone elses).

Joe Duffy's Spirit Level returns to RT 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.

Finally, on Thursday 20th November, RT One airs the highly-acclaimed One Million Dubliners, 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.

Commenting on the Once in a Lifetime season, Roger Childs, Genre Head, Religious Programming on RT , 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.'

LINK:	http://www.rte.ie/about/en/press-office/press-releases/2014/1021/65384...
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