RTÉ1, 2 June 2025
RECALLING THE LAYERS [RADIO]
Lyric FM, 29 June 2025
By Sylvie Kleinman
Housewife of the Year, initially released in cinemas in November 2024, won the Best Irish Feature Documentary category at the Galway Film Fleadh 2024, and its cringeworthiness has elicited vigorous reaction. It retells the story of the competition, created in 1968 and crucially televised in 1982, but not through highbrow theorising or contextualising. Director Ciaran Cassidy opted for the direct retrospections of some finalists and winners. Thus these women tell their half of the story themselves, pondering today on what it had meant, while adding some heretofore hidden layers. Abundant original footage foregrounded Gay Byrne as the gleefully irritating compère, clutching the hands of the ‘lovely contestants’, enquiring how they had met their husbands and when the next child was due. But then we were uplifted by the women today, strolling in bucolic settings near home, chatting frankly in their own cosy environments or floodlit alone on a stage. This harks back to some of the venues for the show but also to the fact that Housewife was made during lockdown.
Hints, not always subtle, urge us to condemn the societal expectations which had set the boundaries for women’s lives. Did the women spontaneously address hot topical issues or had they been prompted with strategically worded questions? Their retrospections were by no means negative and were very effectively woven into the footage of them in the contest. Brought up to be ‘good housekeepers and wives’, there was little emphasis on ‘careers’. Miriam had ‘a great life’ working as a nurse in London, but had to choose the job or marriage. After being a finalist, however, she asked herself whether she wasn’t capable of a little more than she gave herself credit for. A table strewn with dozens of lovingly preserved ‘good luck’ cards from well-wishers indicated that the show was by no means demeaning. Many spoke of the recognition and looked back on happy times nurturing their families. Evidently, ‘our whole lives’ growing up ‘seemed to revolve around religious events’. The Catholic Church naturally gets a wallop, namely in a great clip of a frank chat between Ann, mother of thirteen children, and a theologian. He cheerfully pronounced on the so-called natural ‘certain ways’ tolerated by the Vatican to ‘plan’ families but, as her husband chivalrously remained silent, she admitted that it had not worked ‘for her’. Back to the show and, after the audience applauded Ann for her large family, Gay blurted: ‘It was no bother to her at all’. Indeed.
Harsh realities had not been buried on Housewife when the nation was shaken with greater openness. A disturbing throwback was Olivia O’Leary speaking on Today Tonight about the fate of Ann Lovett, at the age of fifteen, in the Granard grotto in 1984. One Bernie had actually related for Gay how she had become an unmarried mother at seventeen. Assistance was on the way, but her dad (smiling in the audience) had helped deliver her son. Others, however, revealed private challenges. One contestant’s daughter was a single mother struggling in Dublin, ‘probably during Housewife’. When it was announced in church that the child’s father was married, her landlords applied for an eviction order on the grounds of ‘prostitution’, and the young woman (eventually reconciled with her mother) lived in absolute fear. Another contestant’s teenage photos, of a frolic out boating with boys, were brought by the pharmacist who developed them to the priest, urging him to ‘do something about this one’. Disbelieved, she was packed off to the ‘Magdalenas’ and locked in a dark room. One contestant’s husband left her ‘after Housewife’, destitute and reliant on social welfare.
Creatively portraying the uncomfortable nostalgia and almost sci-fi otherworldliness of that Ireland back then mostly worked. Original grainy Housewife footage projected on a real bulky TV was clever, but caricaturing these sets weakened this commendable production. Brown everywhere made for grim pseudo-sitting rooms, though many of the lovelies had worn smart, brightly coloured dresses, notably an iconic purple. The television sets were ridiculously outdated (pre-1982), lit by what looked like an electrified oil lamp on a table with a statuette of the Virgin Mary. We were getting the message that this was somehow Father Ted-ish, but footage of the women at home at the time of competing told a more modern story. Beyond the jigging around the stage or dodgy scenes of playing blindman’s bluff, the ‘housewives’ demonstrated dressmaking, sporting, musical and culinary skills during the contest. These included ‘pork tropicana’, and the winner took home a gas cooker, with a cheque or sometimes a holiday. Undoubtedly our European neighbours partook in such competitions, but today the ‘care-giving’ parent at home is recognised in law as a pensionable citizen. This film appeals to and foregrounds what they call ‘the spirit and resilience’ of these married women, back in those narrow but transformative times.
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Readers outside Dublin may draw inspiration for similar projects from this imaginative piece. Recalling the Layers, if a wee bit drawn-out, exemplifies how engaging a well-constructed exploration on radio can be. Working around a forlorn yet imposing urban artefact—the surviving northern wall of the former Four Courts Marshalsea debtors’ prison and barracks on Dublin’s Bridgefoot Street and its locked ball court—Patricia Barker painstakingly pieced together the stories behind the original complex and its virtual absence since demolition in the mid-1970s.
The Marshalsea (1770s) closed as a prison in 1874, then became a barracks, and finally tenements until 1970. Debtor records stored (safely) in Dublin Castle’s Record Tower were doomed when brought to the Public Records Office. The autobiography of the locally born debtor Walter Thomas Meyler, St Catherine’s Bells, was written in his cell. Architect Gráinne Hassett sheds much light on the noble stonework of the wall, incorporated into Bridgefoot Street Park, and the sector’s layered physicality. Historians contributed further insights, and Brian Crowley literally unlocked the grating rusty lock of the overgrown ball court inside the walls. Locals recalled successive phases in the sector’s physicality, from a forbidding laneway to an open field, and the area’s current multi-ethnicity resonates within this embedded, but here unlocked, heritage.
Sylvie Kleinman is Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of History, Trinity College, Dublin.