Sweet dreams are made of this!

There are many reasons we should cherish TG4 as a television channel – and fostering a love of the Irish language is only one of them.

Just as important is the fact that it provides a platform for documentary makers to air their work – work that wouldn’t get a look-in on RTÉ with its diet of UK and Aussie imported soaps – bringing them to an audience that would otherwise be denied the privilege.

And then there’s a third reason: because once in a while they throw up a documentary from some other far-flung place – often under its Fiorsceal umbrella – that brings you a story, serious or uplifting, that would never have made it into the mainstream.

Last week’s offering in the Fiorsceal slot was called Sweet Dreams, and it was a powerful and moving story based around a group of women who’d experienced the genocide in Rwanda in a variety of ways . . . and now they wanted to open an ice cream shop. There were many obstacles to overcome, most obviously the problems with guaranteed electricity in a country not amenable to storing ice cream without refrigeration.

But they’d overcome their biggest problem much earlier in this process, because these women were from both sides of the ethnic divide that exploded down the middle in 1994 when more than 800,000 Tutsis were butchered and raped by the rampaging Hutus in one of the worst atrocities the world has ever endured.

Among these women were some who lost everything – family, home and future – and others whose parents, husbands, relations had carried out this barbarism.

They came together to meet and see if they could find something to pull them from the wreckage – and that something turned out to be drumming, an art that was previously off-limits to females on the basis that the drums were deemed too heavy for them to handle.

Kiki Katese had worked for many years in theatre and drama and she was the one who decided to start Ingoma Nshya, and to open it up to women from both sides of the conflict. There was only one requirement – to leave the categories of the past at the gate.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.