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Finding healing in truth

An award-winning film produced by Tuam man Tomás Hardiman will screen in Galway next week as part of First Fortnight, a national festival focused on mental health. The unique documentary involves Tomás uncovering sexual trauma from his childhood and moving towards healing. He tells JUDY MURPHY about his journey.

“When I can tell the truth, I am well and when I can’t, I am not well,” says Tuam man Tom Hardiman, who tells his story in a unique documentary, The Days of Trees, which will be screened in the city’s Town Hall Theatre next Tuesday night.

In the film, Tomás revisits his childhood where he unearths terrible events and travels onwards, seeking to transcend the trauma of his early years.

“People might  have said ‘what happened that fellow?’ I feel better when I say it and people know,” he explains of breaking the silence around child abuse.

A well-known figure in the Irish arts world, Tomás worked with the Abbey Theatre in the 1980s as its Press Officer, moving to Galway in the mid-1990s and becoming Director of Galway Arts Centre. He also ran a public relations business and, as a producer, has several successful films to his credit.

The latest of these is 2023’s The Days of Trees, which won a Best Documentary at the 2024 IFTA Awards, beating off competition from international giants like Netflix.

This deeply personal work is being screened at the Town Hall on January 21, as part of Ireland’s First Fortnight arts festival. It was shown in Dublin a couple of weeks ago, also as part of that festival. Tomás, who hadn’t seen it in a year, travelled from his home on the Galway-Clare border for the screening and a Q&A session.

“I’ve healed an awful lot as a result of doing it and putting it out there,” he remarks of the documentary, which he made with his longtime friend and collaborator, director Alan Gilsenan.

In it, Tomás, under the guidance of the late psychiatrist Ivor Browne, unearths deeply buried, traumatic events that occurred when he was a schoolboy at the Christian Brothers in Tuam in the late 1960s. Tomás was abused but the memories of this were buried so deeply they’d eluded him for decades.

“I went through most of my life without knowing it,” he says, adding that he had a drink problem in his younger days.  He doesn’t really discuss that in the film, but it was real. In 2004, after being diagnosed with Type One Diabetes, his doctors advised him to quit alcohol. He did, but then resumed, although he did finally quit soon after.

He was always seeking something more. In 2004, he started seeing a psychotherapist and began training in the Alexander Technique around the same time.

“All my life, I was dabbling in stuff because I had to, but I wasn’t in any position to go into the trauma.”

However, a pathway began to emerge.

In 2011, Tomás and Alan Gilsenan began exploring the idea of making a documentary on the groundbreaking, sometimes controversial psychiatrist Ivor Browne, who’d helped changed the face of mental health medicine in Ireland and who believed childhood trauma was at the root of many psychiatric diagnoses.

“I had known Ivor since before I started in the Abbey,” says Tomás. “He and [his wife] June Levine lived downstairs from me in Dún Laoghaire.”

Setting up documentaries take time, so it was 2016 before they started shooting Meetings with Ivor, which was released in 2018. It’s the first of a loose trilogy in which The Days of Trees is the final instalment.

It featured several well-known people meeting with the psychiatrist as he worked with them to unlock emotional trauma. They included Galway singer, Mary Coughlan and her regression session is one of the film’s most memorable scenes.

“She was open to doing it and it was done privately. We were outside,” Tomás recalls. As it was happening, he began “asking questions of myself” about events his own past that were buried.

“It is so deep, your left hand doesn’t know what your right hand is doing,” he says. But he’d known for years that something wasn’t right.  While training in the Alexander Technique, “if I touched my sternum, I jumped”. That made Tomás aware of the tension his body was holding.

Pictured: Film producer Tomás Hardiman tells his own story in The Days of Trees which will be at the Town Hall next Tuesday. Photo: Brian Harding

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