The BBC, with downloads of its archive confined to British TV licence-holders, and The British Library with its Turning Pages website, where you can browse through 15 books by authors as diverse as da Vinci, Mozart and Jane Austen, have been getting huge publicity, and rightly so. They are wonderful projects.

Quite by accident I discovered a more modest undertaking by the Irish Television station RTÉ but in its own right it’s a gem.

Portrait of Patrick Kavanagh is a wonderful collection of excerpts from programmes by or about the poet, from the Self Portrait of October 1962, where Kavanagh can hardly contain his laughter, down to Paul Durcan’s terrific poem written on Kavanagh’s death, broadcast in 1987. In between is footage of Kavanagh’s publisher Tim O’Keeffe, and interviews with some of the women in his life, including his wife Katherine. The interview with Katherine is particularly moving as it’s obvious that she is in the early stages of the Alzheimer’s Disease which destroyed a lovely, keenly intelligent woman.

Peace to her ashes, though her resting place beside her husband has been desecrated and her name removed. What kind of mentality removes a wife’s name from the grave she shares with her husband I’ll leave the reader to ponder.

But to get back to RTÉ’s archive, they have a smaller collection of Brendan Behan clips, mostly sound only.