By the beginning of the 1970s, Ireland was well and truly caught up in the stepped-up tempo of social change. There was a rising tide of social protest, a tendency to take politics out onto the streets, a will to challenge what was called 'the establishment' and to experiment with new forms of cultural expression. For many, it was true, it was only a superficial trendiness, an unfocused grasping after innovation or a passive flowing with the tide. But for others, it was a deep questioning of old ideas and values, a highly focused pursuit of alternatives and an active commitment to social causes.

In the past decade in Ireland, the nature of 'the establishment' had changed. The new Ireland of Lemass, while still under attack from the right, was now coming under attack from the left. The Lemass era had brought to power an intellectually and culturally impoverished nouveau riche, who believed in prosperity but not much else, at least not very profoundly. They were energetic and full of cocktail party chatter, but they had no clear vision, no coherent values. However, in the new mood, which put a strong emphasis on public morality, the issue was no longer simply the maintenance of frugal self-sufficiency or the pursuit of expansive prosperity, but also the question of how that prosperity was produced and distributed. The management ethos of the Irish Management Institute was not designed to deal with matters of social justice. In an atmosphere giving a high profile to radical, and even socialist, ideas and movements abroad, the issue was no longer simply provincialism versus cosmopolitanism, but of conflicting brands of cosmopolitanism. The new forces, with new links to the wider  world, took a dim view of Industrial Development authority  executives wining and dining potential American investors and preferred to be outside the American embassy protesting against the consequences of what America was actually investing in Vietnam.

In the north, there was the new wave of the traditional ‘troubles’, rooted in decades of residual resentment and sparked off by the new mood of mass movements on the march world wide. The civil rights movement in the north of Ireland was directly influenced by the civil rights movement in the south of the USA. They were moved by the same spirit. They used the same tactics. They sang the same songs. Indeed, We Shall Overcome was echoing the world over. The parallel went further. Just as the peaceful civil disobedience of the SCLC gave way to the more militant and violent black panthers, so did the initiative pass from NICRA to a new IRA armed campaign. The decade was full of civil strife, bombs and bullets, men on the run, internment, direct rule, republican splits, the proliferation of paramilitaries, the emergence of centre parties, two nationists, peace people, political initiatives, loyalist lockouts, republican hunger strikes and on and on, in an escalating cycle of schism and violence. In the south, there was the spillover effect of events in the north. The various shades of republicanism had their organisational networks through the republic. Sinn Fein (Official), Sinn Fein {Provisional) and the Irish Republican Socialist Party contested elections and engaged in various forms of legal political activity, while the Official IRA, Provisional IRA and INLA had their active service units and engaged in various forms of illegal political activity. 1

There were also housing action demonstrations, student sit-ins, contraceptive trains; campaigns against EEC entry, against the Offences Against the State Act, against inequitable taxation of the PAYE sector; campaigns for resources protection, equal pay, contraception and divorce. There were issues and causes galore, one issue for some, another for others, randomly combined for yet others or coherently integrated for still others in a strategy in pursuit of a full-blooded socialist alternative to the existing system. The Labour Party, for its part, had announced at the beginning of the decade that "the seventies will be socialist” and then proceeded to play its part in ensuring that it would not be so. Within Fine Gael, the older blueshirt element came under challenge from a newer 'just society' grouping, representing a cautious but significant move of the older establishment towards some sort of accommodation with social democratic impulses. In 1973, Fianna Fail, after sixteen years in power, fell, to be replaced by a Fine Gael-Labour Coalition, but were back in government again by 1977. For the left, it made little difference, addressing the same sort of protests, pickets, mass meetings and marches to one as to the other.

The women's liberation movement began to be a formidable presence in Irish life, not so much in its particular organisational forms and activities, but more in the whole atmosphere of questioning traditional sex roles that gave rise to it. Women who never attended a women's meeting began to perceive themselves in a new light and to work out their lives in terms of a new range of options. Enlightened men adjusted with equanimity, if not always with ease. Unenlightened men adjusted as well, if without equanimity and with remarkably less ease.

The ever more liberal atmosphere of Irish life brought a new climate for the arts and a new situation for the artist in relation to Irish society. Writers became ever more explicit and more critical in dealing with such matters as religion, sex, politics and class. Even within the theatrical establishment, there was a steady succession of challenging works by such authors as Brian Friel, Eugene McCabe, Tom Murphy, Tom Kilroy and others. Outside it, there was much experimentation, with new theatres, new companies and new forms popping up everywhere. There was the like of Plunkett's The Risen People at the Project and Arden and D' Arcy's Non-Stop Connolly Show at Liberty Hall. There was street theatre all around Dublin city centre. There was also the memorable and exciting visit of the radical 7:84 company creating a highly innovative theatre elsewhere on the celtic fringe.

For some, the new climate provided the opportunity to use art as a means for a public coming to terms with matters of public importance. For others it brought a retreat from the public arena into their own private obsessions. A more ambivalent establishment did not make such a clear target for an artist to attack and to define himself over against in exile, in censored literature and  in despairing self-destruction. A more liberal atmosphere could also be more indifferent. Without coherent orthodoxies to rebel against and without the clarity of vision to construct alternatives, there was a tendency towards forms of cultural expression that were more and more indulgent of individualist idiosyncracy, indifferent to philosophical coherence and dissociated from social context. This was the case with a myriad of forms: ranging from the sincere, if shrunken, worlds of masturbatory novels and highly precious theatrical productions to the pompous pretentiousness of pseudo-avant-garde paintings to the nihilistic nastiness of the punk aesthetic in dress, movement and music. Certainly it was hard to specify any common criteria for what was considered art any more.

The push and pull of the various forces struggling to find their place in Irish society played themselves out in relation to RTE as well. There were new pressures from political left and right, from furious feminists and happy-at-home housewives, from nationalists and two-nationists and from a host of other sources. There were also continuing pressures from Irish speakers, from catholic traditionalists, from rural and urban dwellers. All were judging the televisual picture of reality against their own perceptions of it and finding RTE wanting in one respect or another.

The pressures from the politicians, particularly those in power, continued to build and reached crisis point with the dramatic government dismissal of the RTE authority in 1972. In the course of following the understandable journalistic goal of exploring the political motivation of those in command of the armed campaign in the north, RTE came into conflict with the Fianna Fail government, which summarily replaced the entire RTE authority with a new one. RTE's enthusiasm for the change in government the next year and the appointment of Conor Cruise O'Brien, critic of the previous government's policy on RTE, as minister for posts and telegraphs, was short-lived. The amending legislation which he introduced in 1976 did limit the arbitrary exercise of government power in this domain. But, by issuing a more specific directive, prohibiting interviews with members of proscribed organisations, he strengthened the force of section 31 of the Broadcasting authority Act 1960 in its effect on everyday broadcasting practice in RTE. These events, along with being starved of adequate finance through lack of support from successive governments, left a legacy of suspicion and resentment between politicians and broadcasters.

When the question of a second channel arose, the minister proposed not creating RTE2, but re-broadcasting BBC1 instead. Following a survey showing this to be contrary to public wishes, the decision was made in favour of RTE2. However, due to financial problems, RTE2 only came on air in 1978. Because the issue was posed as between BBC1and RTE2, as between foreign and indigenous culture, the issue of an independent Irish channel was not raised at this time. Stemming from the second channel debate, RTE staff, particularly through the RTE trade union group, mobilised to influence public opinion in favour of RTE and to extract from RTE various guarantees regarding broadcasting practices and working conditions.

There was also the emergence of an ad hoc group calling itself Citizens for Better Broadcasting and publishing a series of position papers entitled Aspects of RTE Television Broadcasting. Among those putting their names to this analysis were acadmics, clerics, trade unionists, and theatre directors such as: Augustine Martin, Gearoid O Tuathaigh, Tony Coughlan, Kader Asmal, Austin Flannery, James McDyer, Terence McCaughey, Michael Mullen and Tomas MacAnna. Their study of RTE schedules revealed an increasing percentage of imported material and, correspondingly, a decreasing percentage of home produced material, as well as an imbalance in the sources of imported material, parallel to the imbalance in global flows analysed by UNESCO and causing international concern. Their recommendations were that home produced programmes should occupy the dominant share of the schedule; that there should be more Irish language and regional programming; that imported programmes should be selected from the widest possible sources. Their proposals also included support for public service broadcasting from public funds in the same manner as support for education and health services and control by a body appointed by the oireachtas to be representative of the whole community, including RTE staff, and to be dismissed only by an oireachtas majority. Their publication also expressed regret at the decline of authentic debate on the central issues in the life of the nation.

The style of RTE drama in the seventies was shaped by many factors, from the central issues in the life of the nation to the exigencies of budget allocations and new developments in the technology of television production. Regarding the latter, the most obvious development, as far as the audience was concerned, was the introduction of colour in the mid-seventies. They might also have noticed a more sophisticated visual style, a more extensive use of locations and a faster pace of plot development, without being precisely aware of the extent to which any of this was due to such factors as increasing use of film and improvement in video editing facilities.

The level of output remained reasonably high, relative to the limited resources of the country and size of its audience. Over the decade, there was on average a new home produced single play every month, plus many more serials, series and mini-series. Although the balance shifted towards more original written-for-television material, there was still considerable adaptation of works written for other media. Adaptations of foreign classics included Andorra, The Rehearsal, The Promise, The Father, The Diary of a Madman, Uncle Vanya, The House of Bernarda Alba, The Strong Are Lonely, and Mother Courage and Her Children. For the most part, the works of such authors as Frisch, Anouilh, Strindberg, Arbuzov, Gogol, Chekov, Lorca, Hochwaelder and Brecht were given fairly standard productions and retained their original settings. Once in a while, they were more freely adapted and put in an Irish setting, such as in Fine Girl You Are, Hugh Leonard's adaptation of Chekov's The Darling. Productions of Irish theatrical classics included Synge's Riders to the Sea.  O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars and Joyce's Exiles were RTE/ Abbey co-productions. More contemporary works of Irish theatre given RTE productions included John Murphy's The Country Boy, Tom Murphy's Famine and The White House, Brian Friel's Crystal and Fox, Eugene McCabe's King of the Castle, Sam Thompson's Over The Bridge and John Boyd's The Flats. Literary works dramatised for television included: The Branchy Tree, Brian Friel's Mr. Sing, My Heart's Delight, Frank O'Connor's The House That Johnny Built, Eric Cross' The Tailor and Ansty, Kate O'Brien's The Last of Summer and Aidan Higgins' Langrishe, Go Down.

Of course, not all of the Irish television drama being watched by Irish audiences was provided by RTE. Perhaps the most memorable adaptations of Irish short stories were provided by Granada under the anthology title The Sinners and shown on RTE as well as ITV. These plays of 1973 were consciously intended to break British attitudes of condescension towards the Irish. The producer, Brian Armstrong, looked for particularly 'meaty' stories for this series of 12 one hour plays. He used Irish settings, Irish actors and Irish scriptwriter Hugh Leonard to dramatise works of Irish authors Sean O Faolain, Frank O'Connor, James Joyce, James Plunkett and Brian Friel. They were excellent and quite unforgettable productions, which impressed Irish audiences, as well as British ones, with what Irish talent could actually do. Granada also made an adaptation of Frank O'Connor's An Only Child. Other ITV companies also produced Irish drama from time to time, with productions such as HTV's co-production with CBS, an adaptation of Brian Moore's novel Catholics, set on an island off the west  coast of Kerry. BBC produced a fair amount of Irish drama as well, again most of it in the way of literary adaptation, which included Joyce's Stephen D and Two Gallants, O'Connor's First Confession and Macken's The Island of the Great Yellow Ox.

It was not all adaptation though. There was also the comedy series Me Mammy written by Hugh Leonard and performed by Irish actors. There were also serious and controversial works dealing with the dilemmas of Northern Ireland politics, although there was a lot of water under the bridge between Sam Thompson's Cemented With Love in 1965 and The Legion Hall Bombing in 1978, both of which were postponed before finally being transmitted.

Other Irish television drama was made by Irish independent  producers, often co-funded and transmitted by RTE. Films such as Kieran Hickey's Exposure and Criminal Conversation, Bob  Quinn's Poitin, Joe Comerford's Traveller and Down the Corner, Tom McArdle's The Kinkisha and Robert Wynne Simmons Double Piquet fell into this category. There was also The Hebrew Lesson made by the Dublin Film Cooperative at Ardmore Studios.

Occasionally too, there was an American television movie made in Ireland employing some degree of Irish talent, such as the thriller Cry of the Innocent.

RTE not only promoted, transmitted or co-funded these types of production, but made its first forays into the field of co-productions. As well as the plays co-produced with the Abbey theatre, RTE entered into its first co-productions with BBC. The first was in 1975, a psychological thriller by Michael Judge, Full Fathom Five, changed somewhat from its RTE production ten years earlier. The second was in 1979, a Harold Pinter adaptation of the Aidan Higgins novel Langrishe, Go Down.

However, most Irish television drama was in-house RTE production, though all of it was produced and received in a cultural environment characterised by exceptionally high exposure of both programme makers and audience to what was being done in television elsewhere. There were new genres, most often Irish versions of television genres being developed abroad. The popularity of imported medical series with Irish audiences gave rise to the indigenous Partners in Practice. The addiction of viewers to police series was given an injection from home sources in The Burke Enigma. The pull of the historical epic was meant to draw the audience fond of BBC costume drama to the saga of Kilmore House spanning 150 years of Irish life. The foreign sitcoms were given domestic analogues in The Lads, The Lodgers, What The Butler Missed, I Try To Ignore It But I Love It, Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow and Up in the World. For those who liked BBC productions of Beckett and Pinter, there was Wesley Burrowes' surreal play The Becauseway, "a play about reality, using none of the conventions of realism", It was set in an indeterminate time and place, but definitely a long way from 1970s Leestown. For those who admired the socially crusading drama-documentary of British television drama, like Cathy Come Home and Spongers, there was RTE's A Week in the Life of Martin Cluxton. 3 This sort of drama was given greatest scope later in the decade when Louis Lentin, as head of drama, instituted the regular Thursday Playdate slot, in a conscious attempt to achieve in Irish television what Armchair Theatre did in bringing a new wave of social drama to British television. 4

There were serious efforts to stimulate the writing of original drama dealing with contemporary Ireland for production by RTE.  Donall Farmer, as head of drama, approached established Irish writers to write for RTE. In addition, RTE sponsored a television drama competition and sent out guidelines on how to write for television to try to find new writers. It gave RTE productions to both the winner and the runner-up in this project: Liam MacUistin's The Glory and the Dream in 1971 and Maureen Donegan's Who Me? in 1972.

Another attempt to stimulate contemporary drama was the highly experimental Caravan series. The formula, devised by producer Tony Barry, was to send a researcher into a town or industrial plant and to construct from interviews a broad picture of the social groupings, issues and problems of the place. Writers Michael Judge, Carolyn Swift and Eoghan Harris would then produce a series of open-ended sketches reflecting this picture. Following this, an outside broadcast unit would arrive in the place, actors would perform the sketches and then the production team would conduct an open-ended discussion of the pertinent issues sparked off by the sketches, combined with contributions by local singers, dancers and musicians.

Only two of the programmes had been transmitted when the series was taken the air due to various controversies and legal complications arising from It. Spotlighting the atrocious wages paid to outworkers in the knitwear and footwear industries in Kilkenny and satirising the manners and mores of the nouveau riche who had built empires on smuggling in Drogheda, brought strong representations and protests from the local chambers of commerce and the Legion of Mary. Querying the role of the medical officer in Waterford Glass, in terms of his ties to the owners and the alleged difficulties of workers in acquiring sick certificates brought a libel suit upon RTE. Although producers wanted to let the matter go to court, RTE's legal officer advised  against it. 5 RTE settled out of court and took the series off the air.

This pattern was what most characterised the RTE drama of the seventies: RTE, through its programme makers, venturing as close as they found desirable or possible to giving a picture of the problems and possibilities at the cutting edges of contemporary Irish society and RTE, through its management, sometimes pushing full-steam ahead and other times applying the brakes, flattening out, apologising, giving way to pressure and taking programmes off the air in mid-run. The overall picture, looking back on it, was one of great vision and verve, punctuated by moments of reaction and failure of nerve.

Wesley Burrowes analysed the situation, as it presented itself to him, in terms of "a nervous tic in the face of RTE":

“It will rarely happen that a specific person in authority will say "This is unacceptable”. He will more likely say that, while he personally sees nothing wrong with it, his immediate superior is not so broad-minded and perhaps it might be better to change it. If you ever meet the superior, he will say the same about his superior, and so on up the ladder. My own view of the Tic (if I may use this as a collective term for nervous men) was that they tended to pre-judge the conscience of the viewers, instead of consulting their own” 6

Indeed, what the powers-that-be at RTE let through was far more than what a significant strand of the Irish audience thought iappropriate. The nervousness of RTE management over what viewers and their elected representatives would take in the way of progressive programming did not come from nowhere. Many in RTE were aware of a double standard in their audience, in that completely different criteria of acceptability were applied to home produced programmes from what were applied to imported ones. As Burrowes characterised this in relation to The Riordans:

“Irish viewers seem to accept fairly equably (even enthusiastically, in the case of The Brothers and Rich Man, Poor Man) any amount of sex and sadism, as long as it is foreign-made, while retaining the strictest of standards about what RTE produces”. 7

It was an accurate reflection of what was going on at that time when younger catholic women were going on the pill in that spirit and younger catholic priests were taking that sort of stance, or even going further, in opposition to papal proclamations. It was also an indicator of the progressing protestantisation of catholicism, expressed in what came to be called “a la carte catholicism”. Nevertheless, individual viewers, provincial newspapers and county councils heaped censure upon RTE, Wesley Burrowes and everyone connected with propagating, or even acknowledging, such views.

Many of the audience were confused with all the changes that had taken place in catholicism and in Irish society. They wanted the old clarity, not an analysis of the new confusion. Mary Riordan, more than the rest, spoke for them. She could not accept the breakdown of her daughter's marriage and a discussion of it with her son encapsulated the disorientation of all like her, who had accepted a total identification between morality and church edict. In a scene in which Mary was going on about 'this annulment nonsense', Michael told her that she would have to get used to it. She replied that she never would. Michael, pushing her to examine her premises, elicited the reason that she was against it was because it was against everything she always believed in, ie, everything the church had always taught her. Michael, pushing further, asked how she would feel if the church's decision were to grant the annulment:

Mary: "I would feel let down.

Michael: "You wouldn't agree with the decision?”

Mary: "No, I certainly would not.”

Michael: "But, don't you see, then your argument wouldn't be with Jude? It would be with the church.”

Mary:  “Ah You're only trying to confuse me with all this smart talk. It's not right, Michael, and it never will be.”

In the end, The Riordans got away with it, no doubt because the controversial issues, especially those relating to sexual morality, were raised with a deeply rooted authenticity within a long-established sympathy for popular and credible characters.  It was also because of the skilful style of scriptwriting that represented a range of points of view that never veered very far to the left and kept balanced at centre or just left of centre, It gave much scope to the expression of views considerably to the right of centre, without ever giving way to the pressures to over-balance in that direction. By the end of the decade, it was possible to proceed with storylines that went much further than ones that had been over-ruled in early or mid-decade. Even Maggie, never mind Benjy, could have an affair by the late seventies.

However, the series that notoriously did not get away with it was The Spike. Although The Spike was taken off the air in mid-run, amidst a storm of protest and blaze of publicity, following upon an infamous nude scene, the Issues involved were actually far more complicated and even now need careful unravelling for the record.

The Spike  began what was to be its ten week run in January 1978. It was set in a post-primary co-educational public sector school in an unspecified urban working class area in its own time. It was, in actuality, quite specifically set in Dublin, both in the locations used in its production and in the clear associations it had in the minds of its audience. It was, even more specifically, shot in the Ringsend Technical Institute with classes actually in session and cast with pupils from Ringsend and Ballymun, giving it an authenticity that blurred the line between fact and fiction. It was, in fact, meant to be a rigorously realistic picture of a particular sector of the Irish education system, grounded in the authenticity of its scriptwriter's own experience as a teacher in that sector.

It was furthermore intended to shed light on certain features of the Irish education system in general and of Irish society as a whole, which accounted for the inequalities and incongruities manifest in that particular sector. It was strongly implied that its analysis of that system, although presented in a fictional format, could be verified by an objective factual study of that system in reality. Its credibility was clearly staked out as standing or falling in terms of this sort of verisimilitude. Although the official name of the fictional school in question was St. Aidans, it was commonly called the Spike, because, it was said, it was once a workhouse, but also because, it was inferred, the dark shadow of that sort of world still hung over it. The Spike was pictured as a dumping ground for rejects which had been weeded out, according to the highly questionable criteria of a selection process in the Irish educational system that was tied to the class divisions of Irish society and to the role of the church in maintaining those divisions.

The author, Patrick Gilligan, pulled no punches in setting out his anti-establishment point of view. Despite his commitment to the VEC sector and his respect for the wisdom inspiring the 1931 Vocational Education Act, the reality on the ground, as he saw it, was that this sector was distinguished by a stigma. Although the vision of education as a community process dedicated to the total development of human potential sometimes managed to shine through the murk and sordidity of schools like the Spike, the darkness more often prevailed over the light. In explaining why, he wrote in the RTE Guide:

“Irish society , with its genius for division along class lines, is in no doubt at all about the role of the public sector school. The Spike is a scrap heap. Scrap can be refined into nobler metal, but the process is tiresome and costly and there are always more insistent priorities than the undeserving poor.” 10

Even worse, there were the aspiring ambitions of the wife of the public sector principal who insisted on sending their daughter to a private boarding school so that “at least she won't marry into the flats”. Along the way, the series touched on many problems rooted in class inequality: poverty, prostitution, illiteracy, anti-social behaviour in social institutions, domestic violence, child labour, lack of study time for students with bread winning responsibilities, lack of career opportunities, political hypocrisy and power struggles for control of the education system. Running through it all was an unmistakable indictment of those in power in both church and state for the incongruities and injustices pervading the status quo. The lines of connection were brought to sharpest expression in the final, though never to be transmitted, episode when O'Mahony, the acting principal of the Spike, went to the parliamentary secretary in indignation at the furtive and evasive activities of the religious orders: engineering the re-organisation of post-primary education in the area so that the new Spike would be run by a new board of management controlled by its competitors.

The politician quite straightforwardly set forth the political expediencies of the situation. His party, he explained, mightn't have given the working class anything else, but they had given them aspirations, perhaps aspirations above their station. In consequence, he went on:

“They have middle class aspirations now, and middle class values, and middle class kids belong by right of tradition to the religious schools”.

“But you can't imagine the religious letting what they see as part of their traditional enrolment drift into the godless, non-denominational Spike. What can they do? They haven't the brothers and they haven't the nuns. This approach is devious, but it ensures that the faith of our fathers will survive until vocations pick up again”.

“No politician can afford to disregard the faith of our fathers and no government can afford to dismiss the aspirations of the would-be middle class. And stay in power”.

“Your party has publicly set its face against any weakening of the family unit. Not out of conviction, but because the pulpit controls the marginal votes. She will have the responsibility of shaping young minds”.

Not that Irish viewers saw that much of it. The fifth episode was the last to be transmitted. This episode concerned the night classes held at the Spike, being a school with a heavy commitment to adult community education, in addition to its responsibilities to youth in the area of the post-primary curriculum. The episode was full of the author's characteristic humour, which he felt to be an important dimension of the series, so as not to present a picture of unrelieved gloom. The camera cut throughout from the corridors to the classrooms, highlighting three classes in particular: the Bernard T Mullins confidence course, the 'know your fur' class and the 'cleaning science' class. While its humour had its moments, such as Bernard T. Mullins reeking of whiskey to get himself the confidence to face a new confidence class or a  candidate for the modelling position declaring she had the specified measurements only to be told she was confusing inches with centimetres, but on the whole the humour was glib and clumsy and usually missed the mark. It would have been worth tackling Irish inhibitions regarding verbal and tactile communication and worth exploring negative attitudes to the human body implicit in the taboo against nakedness, even perhaps with a touch of well-aimed humour. But this script was most definitely not the way to do so and the humour was most emphatically not well-aimed.

In the course of one night's confidence class, those who began too shy to speak were, by the end of the session, wandering the corridors mauling total strangers out of the blue. When the principal walked in the middle of the 'shy class' they were invited to practice their touches on him, from the matey arm around the shoulder to the 'friendly crotch touch'. In the course of one night's art class, the art teacher began by making an aggressive case for the necessity of a nude model, waxing eloquently on serpentine lines of beauty and undulating curves. He then found a suitable model in a woman from the shy class who proceeded to undress and come on to him seductively. He proceeded to lose his composure completely and dismiss the class. He ended up declaring ludicrously that he would not expose what was suddenly his fiance to the vulgar gaze of bankers, butchers and spinsters. It was too false to be funny, even for those who might have wanted to laugh and saw the comic potential in the material. It was too crude to elicit any real sympathy, even among those predisposed to be open-minded in broaching such subjects.

Regarding the notorious nude scene, it must be said that, however heavy-handed the script, the style of shooting brought to it by the director, Noel O Briain, was extremely cautious and restrained. Once undressed, the woman's body was first seen from side and front angles from behind a screen. Then when posing for the art class, the body was first shot from behind only from the hips up in a medium close-up, followed by a view of the full body from the side, but only in long shot. When turning to the classical reclining pose, there was only a long shot of the full body and a medium shot from the hips up. Nevertheless, no matter how good or bad the script, no matter how delicate or brash the direction, all hell broke loose over the fact that there was a nude scene at all. This was the centre of focus in the furore that followed and it remains in popular memory as the rock on which The Spike foundered and the reason why it was taken off the air.

The truth was that there were pressures building up against the series the whole time it was in production and that there was a climate of hostility established against it before it ever went on the air. There were rumours and press reports of rumblings and reservations in the department of education before anyone even saw it. There were objections from the christian brothers, who had heard the name of the school was to be St. Aidan's, seemingly believing that running a school by the same name gave them proprietary rights over its use. Once it was on the air, Brother Vivian Cassells denounced the series as having nothing to offer and called on RTE to take if off the air after the fourth episode, and to "consign the remaining six to the obscurity they deserve." The television columns and letters pages of the national and provincial press were full of negative reviews and condemnations of the programme for vulgar and obscene language, for poor production standards, for gross distortion in its picture of the education system. There were features on schools taking pains to demonstrate how unlike the Spike they were. Even the more favourably disposed reviewers criticised it for being exaggerated and heavy-handed. Tom O'Dea, in The Irish Press, bent over backwards to find its redeeming features, but had to admit it showed 'signs of overloading'. 12 Ken Gray, in The Irish Times, called it 'gross exaggeration' and sympathised with actors struggling with intractable material. He also commented on a 'naive, adolescent approach to sex'. 13

The Spike began to appear on the agendas of political bodies. Press reports of official condemnations added their weight to the mounting pressures. Waterford county council called it a slur on teachers. Fermoy urban council called it vulgar and suggestive. RTE could be in no doubt that they were broadcasting over troubled waters. However, once the nude scene appeared, the troubled waters swelled to flood proportions. The founder of the League of Decency, JB Murray, suffered a heart attack, attributed to the stress caused by the sight of the naked female body on the television screen. His wife told the papers that the family had tried to stop him watching it, but he insisted on doing so. He got very worked up at the nude scene and was phoning the newspapers to complain when he came to grief over the 'filthy play'. 14 The incident received much publicity and took its place in the folklore of modern Ireland, as virtually all factions agreed on its symbolic significance in giving sharp and concrete expression to the characteristic tensions and ironies of Irish society in the television era.

In the days and weeks that followed, The Spike in general, and the nude scene in particular, were the talk of the town in virtually every town and townland in the country. Those who missed it felt they had missed a crucial event in the life of the nation. RTE's drama policy, the nation's morals and Madeleine Erskine's body were on centre stage in the most heated cultural controversy of  decades. It was a major talking point in homes, schools, offices and pubs. It was a prominent item on the agenda of the most diverse meetings. It was a point of reference in court cases. Day by day, the lore surrounding it swelled, reaching ever more farcical heights of hilarity, at least for those who were not too angry or too bruised to see the funny side of it. Jim Fitzgerald claimed he had been assaulted by a fat elderly lady, who asked him if he had been in The Spike, and then thumped him when he said yes. RTE was flooded with phone calls, telegrams and letters of protest. There was a new wave of resolutions from public bodies, this time not only condemning the series, but  demanding it be banned. There were newspaper editorials calling for its withdrawal. The Fine Gael spokesman on education, Eddie Collins, urged the director-general to put a stop to the programme as "an indefensible and unjustifiable attack on the teaching profession and authorities." 15 . In the discussion leading up to Limerick county council's unanimous condemnation, it was said that there was no school in Ireland even remotely resembling the Spike and it was asked what was the reason for concocting a school where everybody, teachers and students alike, seemed depraved. It was then claimed that problems had arisen in a Limerick city school, where there had previously been no problems, that were directly attributable to The Spike. 16

When the announcement came that the series was to be withdrawn, it was front page news. Sub-editors found it impossible to resist a spate of articles headed "The Spike is spiked and The spiking of The Spike. Telegrams of congratulations and resolutions of support came pouring into RTE.

However, if the decision went a long way towards relieving the pressure brought to bear from outside, it in turn pressed hard upon the points of pressure from inside. The decision, not surprisingly, sparked off a bitter controversy within RTE. The director-general, Oliver Maloney, who took the decision, defended the decision on the basis that the series "had failed to  achieve its programming objectives." 17 The RTE authority backed the director-general and stated that the series was making RTE a "target of ridicule." 18 The controller, however, took sharp issue with the director-general. Muiris Mac Conghail, who was controller at the time of its transmission though not at the time of its production, issued a confidential memorandum to programme makers, which was discussed at an unprecedented meeting of all production staff and union representatives within RTE and quoted in the public press. Mac Conghail stated unequivocally that the decision would be seen ''as a victory for and by those whose criticism of the series are provoked by prudish, or indeed, illiberal and censorious considerations”. To cease transmission in mid-run was "to give substance and definition for a long time to a rather narrowly-based articulation of morality”. It would have, he asserted, "serious implications for future drama policy”. He admitted that much of the criticism had been well-founded, but he felt that there was a "slightly hysterical note prevailing in the public debate and that there was "frankly, also a considerable class reaction to the series”. He believed that the series did not transgress public morality or acceptable public taste and should be continued. 19 Basically his view, as he expressed it publicly later, was that RTE made two mistakes in relation to The Spike: the first was putting it on and the second was taking it off. Although it was badly written and made under difficult conditions, it was withdrawn for the wrong reasons. RTE should have taken more time over it and then stood by it. Instead, it was done in a hurry and RTE lost its confidence and its courage. 20

Noel O Briain, the producer, also defended the programme strongly at the time. He denied that the nude scene was meant to titillate and argued that its purpose was to examine attitudes to nudity. He pointed to the double standard of the audience, who had not complained of nude scenes in foreign programmes transmitted by RTE. He asked:
 

“Why was it all right for an American or a black woman to appear naked on Irish television screens but not an Irish woman” ? 21

Looking back, he conceded that the series should have been done in a more subtle way, but believed it should have been allowed to continue and find its way. He was convinced at the time, and remained so, that it was taken off more for its controversial view of the education system than for any other reason. 22 Patrick Gilligan, the author, also referred to the double standard of the audience and considered the opposition to the The Spike to be a vote for imported programmes. He pointed to the programme's high TAM ratings and insisted that it had considerable support. As to charges of crudity, this was debatable. 23 Coming to his defence was fellow scriptwriter David Hayes, who referred to Gilligan as a "victim of our two-tone morality, whiter than white on the surface and murky underneath”. This, he believed, was the reason for RTE giving in to the craw-thumpers. 24 Jim Fitzgerald, talking to the press with a plaster on his forehead, denounced the decision as censorship and as a return to the days when Sean O'Faolain and Frank O'Connor were banned. He asked if RTE was going to be controlled by JB Murray and the League of Decency. 25 Others, while inclined to sympathise with the aims of the series, found it difficult to sympathise with its execution. Michael Judge, himself both a teacher and a scriptwriter, felt it was ham-fisted and chaotic, that it was almost as if it had gone on a suicide course. 26 Still others were anxious not to let off the hook those who hid behind its inadequacies in execution to avoid facing the facts that it was its intention to disclose. The jesuit sociologist, Micheal MacGreil, suggested that there might have been more truth in the stricken series than most people had been prepared to admit. 27 The Irish Times education correspondent, Christina Murphy, asked how different the public reaction would have been, if it had been the most sophisticated production RTE had ever put in the can. She conjectured:

“ The cries of horror would have been only marginally less vocal. I doubt if the League of Decency would have accepted a nude scene, however tastefully and relevantly presented. I equally doubt the ability of many teachers to accept an honest look at vocational schools written by Shakespeare and produced by Lew Grade”. 28

Nevertheless, the battle lines were drawn and many who jumped into the fray were ill-disposed to take pains over the finer points of the aesthetics or politics of the series. The taoiseach, Jack Lynch, used the occasion of the Jacob's awards to express his support for the decision to take The Spike off the air, despite the fact that he had not seen it. Needless to say, his insistence that, "speaking objectively”, the director-general and the RTE authority had been right, did not go down very well with the programme makers in attendance. The forces were lining up to rub salt in the open wounds. The Irish Catholic went out of its way to point out that, for once, RTE liberals could not blame the bishops. It was the plain people of Ireland who had called them to account for their artistic crudity and moral laxity. 31 While this claim was not completely without warrant, there was also evidence of a certain degree of orchestration of the public response by church institutions. For example, in the letters that came into RTE, there were a number from the same class at Presentation Convent, all using almost the same language, each claiming to be an individual child offended by the programme. JB Murray meanwhile thanked the plain people of Ireland for the enormous number of cards and messages of support that came pouring into St. Vincent's Hospital. He took exception to the remarks of Muiris MacConghail and Jim Fitzgerald, which he regarded as offensive, and was glad to see the tables turned on such liberals who had too often got their way.

Meanwhile, the trade unions took their stand. The producers union, the Workers Union of Ireland, supported the stand taken by the  controller. The actors union, Equity, did as well and expressed its members determination that the actors involved, particularly Madeleine Erskine, not be victimised. The teachers unions, in this case, were on the other side. On and on it went. It even found its way onto the order paper of Dail Eireann, when Dr. Noel Browne, TD asked if the cancellation of the series was to be taken as the precedent for a new form of censorship.

The audience research service at RTE issued several very detailed reports on The Spike, both before and after cancellation. The opinions of the panel were somewhat more complex and differentiated than those who took the initiative to write in or phone the station. The bottom line, however, in the post-cancellation survey, was that 66% believed that the series as a whole was poor. 56% approved of RTE's decision to stop transmission, while 39% disapproved. 49% said RTE should not transmit the remaining episodes. 26% advocated transmission and a further 21% recommended transmission linked to a studio discussion of the series. (RTE Audience Research Reports February 28, March 3 and Apri126, 1978).

In retrospect, it can be said that The Spike was a brave, sincere and progressive attempt to use drama to raise public consciousness on public issues of considerable public importance. However, it was, it also must be said, an attempt that fairly clearly failed to achieve its objectives. This was both because of external pressures, which were unquestionably unfair and excessive, and because of internal deficiencies, which put its defence on weak ground when it came under such stridently strong attack. Without doubt, it ran to ground for many reasons. The question remains as to whether it would have been taken off if controversial matters had been raised with greater subtlety and sophistication, if the scriptwriting had been more adept, if production standards had been higher. On balance, there is still reason to believe that the pressure to do so would have been there, no matter how impressively it had been done, due to its explicit treatment of human sexuality, its unflattering picture of the education system and its oppositional stance in relation to the exercise of power by both church and state.

Perhaps the most controversial material was in the untransmitted episodes. Most certainly the transmission of these would have heated up the already heated controversy to boiling point. The next episode scheduled to go out concerned youthful IRA activity and the influence of an Irish teacher's fervent nationalism upon his idealistic students. After showing the atmosphere of mystification of nation, sex and death in the Irish class, matters came to ahead with the news that a boy in the class had been blown to bits transporting explosives at the border. Although at first full of heroic tribute to the lad's patriotism and supreme sacrifice, the first real pressure upon the teacher's convictions brought an abrupt volte face, turning from the most traditional and romantic republicanism to the most cynical and flippant revisionism. Again the author short-circuited any serious reflection on the serious issues involved by substituting an abrupt volte face for which no psychological grounding had been given. With the characterisation so lacking in credibility and the issues at stake getting such short shrift, it would have surely failed to achieve either dramatic effect or moral enlightenment.

Another episode which might not have gone down very well, with either liberal or conservative sections of the population, though for different reasons, was the one on prostitution. On the one hand, it elicited a certain sympathy for prostitutes by highlighting the plight of Rosaleen who had left school at eight and who had to overcome both illiteracy and fear of being fried by her pimp-cum-chip-van-proprietor. It also showed prostitutes as having a certain pride in earning their money, which made them seem superior to nagging and grasping wives. On the other hand, it enunciated only two points of view regarding prostitution. The first was that of the police superintendent, who believed that the world's oldest profession provided a socially necessary safety valve and that its elimination would leave a dangerous vacuum. The second was that of O'Mahony, who believed that it was a degraded life and wanted to set up night classes for prostitutes to offer them a way out, by teaching them deportment, nutrition, social skills and home making. Essentially, his idea was to reform them by making them marriageable. As O'Mahony analysed their situation, what it came down to was this:

"I can't imagine a girl wanting to spread herself under a jobber for a fiver, when she could marry him and have the lot.”

The author's engagement with the sort of issues raised by the women's liberation movement, as relevant to the scenario he had staked out, was quite primitive. Such confrontation as there was was most explicit in the final episode, in which the struggle for power within the school converged with a contemporary form of the age old battle of the sexes. Finding the most formidable competition for the top post in the form of a young female, who was not only highly attractive, but had higher academic qualifications, O'Mahony's reaction was a combination of  an unreconstructed horniness and sexist deviousness. The script throughout the series in general, but in this episode in particular, was full of sexist humour, which would have been all right if there had been anything else in the script to counterpoint it or to highlight it with some sort of critical edge. However, there was no indication of anything in the author's own point of view rising above it. Running through the series was a particular male view of the female of the species, and not a very mature or sophisticated one at that, dominated by a somewhat adolescent, voyeuristic approach to female sexuality. It was a viewpoint of men superficially aware of the impact of the women's liberation movement, but not significantly affected by it.

In the end, there was little ground for anyone to stand on to defend it. Those who would have been willing to accept a critical perspective on the education system and explicit reference to human sexuality were undercut by the clumsiness of treatment of the issues, the superficiality of the characterisation and the immaturity of the underlying point of view.

The legacy left by The Spike is hard to assess. If the result was to emphasise that new ground should be broken with much greater care and that the critique of existing social systems and of prevailing sexual mores should be approached with greater maturity and sophistication, there would have been something to show for this unfortunate episode in Irish television history. If, however, no such explicit lesson was drawn from it, and the  result was to reinforce a posture of nervousness and timidity and a reluctance to risk offending any sizeable section of the audience, it may have actually set back efforts to open up drama to the terrain of dealing with the controversial growing points of contemporary society.
Social and Political Satire
Not all of the tension generated by this sort of timidity resulted in programmes being taken off the air. However, the failure to give full support to controversial programmes  brought a certain disaffection among those who were willing to risk sailing close to the wind.

This was the case with some of the best political and social satire produced by RTE, particularly the two Niall Toibin series If the Cap Fits (1973) and Time Now, Mr. T  (1977). Every programme in these two series was a veritable tour de force on the part of Niall Toibin, who did much of the scriptwriting and played an enormous number of roles.

In the course of the short sketches of If the Cap Fits, he appeared as ninety different characters, encompassing such roles as taoiseach, RTE newsreader, RTE arts presenter, IRA chief of staff, unionist ideologue, Dublin trade union leader, sports journalist, bishop, priest, nun and a host of others, leaving virtually no prototypical figure of contemporary Irish life with its comic potential untapped. The characters were not simply vague types, however, but cut to the bone in the way the taoiseach was so acutely Liam Cosgrave, the IRA chief of staff so obviously Cathal Goulding, the bishop so recognisably Eamonn Casey. Some were amalgams. The Dublin trade union leader was conceived as a combination of Mickey Mullen and Mattie Merrigan, though when Niall Toibin had occasion to see either of them afterwards, he thought it very funny that Mickey Mullen took it to be Mattie Merrigan and Mattie Merrigan took it to be Mickey Mullen. 32

In the longer sketches of Time Now, Mr. T, he gave in depth interviews uncovering the layers of personality in guises ranging from St. Patrick to Edna O'Brien. He came forward as well as the midlands auctioneer raging war alike on communists, street traders and taxmen, as the northern protestant savant expounding on the nature of the southern state, as the cynical Corkman seeing Dublin imperialism in an RTE announcer's "good evening”, as another Dublin trade union leader with a difficult wife. The scripts were highly literate and the performances were  extremely energetic, generating an effervescent humour that was both intelligent and earthy at the same time. Many of the  laughs came from verbal ironies based on misconceived metaphors, malapropisms, mispronunciations, mistranslations, incongruous juxtapositions, double entendre and grandiloquent phraseology applied to banal realities. There was the taoiseach's speech about "the fledgling filly that was our free state” and the need to root out "mongrel foxes and other vermin” and to deal with "this ring of shysters and shop stewards”. There was the RTE continuity announcer giving a posh but ignorant pronunciation to every other word. There was the commentary on the film Last Tango in Dingle, full of pseudo sophisticated jargon about the "screen dialectic” and "aesthetic-didactic conflict”, full of small nation pride in a product unique in that "almost two of the actors were Irish and another almost Irish, another almost an actor”. The Irish film with English subtitles translated "led thoil” as "right on” and  “A bhfuil tu fuar?” as “Are you frigid?” .Then the credits rolled on and on:

script by Dominic Behan
adapted by Hugh Leonard
based on an original idea by Ulick O'Connor
based on a novel by Bryan MacMahon...

 "you were born in O'Connell Street in 1916...
 "you were chief of staff of six wings of the republican movement
 "your motherless child scheme
 "your two left wing tracts: "Ireland further from God” and "Ireland even further from God”...

Although the humour was highly verbal, the nuances of facial and gestural performance, as well as the skills of makeup and wardrobe in establishing each persona, gave it a visual dimension that did much to intensify the pleasure in its ironies and to justify the use of television as a medium. Often the humour was in visual / verbal juxtaposition, such as in a sequence which consisted simply of a succession of stills of Fianna Fail government ministers with only laughter on the sound track. Sometimes the visual aspect carried the humour, as when featuring artefacts embodying the tackiness of Irish visual culture and connecting the Irish film industry with diversification in the direction of a company making plastic porcupines for children's baths and Pope Paul lampshades.

No one could say that these series chose soft targets. They took on the institutions of church and state, legal and illegal organisations, indeed RTE itself. Those involved knew they were dealing with controversial material and were not surprised to meet with oppositional calls and letters from certain sections of the audience. However, both Niall Toibin and Brian MacLochlainn, the producer of the series, were disappointed at the lack of support within RTE. When Niall Toibin did a sketch as a female social worker discussing self-abuse, there were phone calls and letters protesting, to which RTE responded with apologies. Toibin naturally felt let down and left to wonder whether the amount of stick was really worth it. He concluded that the country was obviously not ready for satire. There was, he believed, a huge amount of self-righteousness in the country that needed to be pulled up by laughing at it. The attempt to do so had brought him criticism such as he had never faced in his career. He was beset with accusations of trying to pervert, corrupt and deprave the entire Irish nation. Brian Mac Lochlainn, for his part, felt let down when RTE would not approve another series. 33

Another series of the same era, most definitely RTE's bravest and best period for social and political satire, was the long running and fondly remembered Hall's Pictorial Weekly. It had its origins in the Newsbeat programme, in which its editor Frank Hall scoured the highways and byways of Ireland in search of colourful characters and off-beat situations. According to Hall, it occurred to him one day that he would be much more the master of the situation, if he simply sat at home and wrote the sketches, instead of beating the bushes. 34 As it happened, Hall  wrote a script about "the finest minister for hardship which this country ever had", which Eamonn Morrissey masterfully played as Liam Cosgrave. The character caught on like wildfire. It continued and developed over the next years and became indelibly sketched on folk memory. Other characters emerged too as cartoon counterparts of various familiar figures of the times. The programme is best remembered for its anarchist lampooning both of specific politicians and of the political process itself. Its great contribution, as John Boland put it in Hibernia, was in its lampooning of the political, cultural and business leaders of "our parish pump society in which private malice never matured into public satire”. 35  Although Toibin and Hall were willing to challenge their audience to come to that sort of maturity and much of the audience were more than willing to get into it, others were not. Brigid Hogan O'Higgins complained about it in the Dail. Other national politicians refrained from public comment on it. Provincial politicians, however, did not refrain and county councillors were forever giving out about the slagging of county councillors. All the same, problems arose over meetings of the Longford urban district council conflicting with the programme for councillors who didn't want to miss it.

Hall's Pictorial Weekly was at its strongest during the 1973-1977 term of the Fine Gael-Labour coalition government. So sharp and constant was its satirical send up of the government ministers of the time, that it is generally accepted that the programme played an important part in bringing the coalition into disrepute and perhaps even contributed to bringing it down. Once the coalition was out and Fianna Fail was back in again, the programme was never quite the same. There were still funny sketches about Bord Failte and nuns joining trade unions and RTE reporters getting progressively more drunk at every press session they attended. It even had a go at highlighting the hilarity surrounding The Spike scenario. However, the edge seemed to have gone out of its political satire, which was always the programme's strong point. The columnists began to observe a slide, attributed to the programme being soft on Fianna Fail. The character based on the taoiseach, Jack Lynch, was essentially a benign figure. Despite the fact that there were as many targets worthy of satirical treatment as ever, at least in the view of the commentators, the programme never quite managed to rise to it in their opinion.36 This did not stop Fianna Fail councillors from giving out about such satire as was directed towards them. However, their Fine Gael and Labour counterparts were quick to point out that they had only become unhappy with Frank Hall since the change of government. Their opponents found it quite amusing to observe their response, now that the boot was on the other foot. 37

As it turned out, with one thing or another, including Eamonn Morrissey moving on and Frank Hall becoming the film censor, Hall's Pictorial Weekly came to the end of its long run by the end of the decade. In its time, it went very close to the bone and it was to RTE's credit to have sustained such a sharp production for so long. According to producer Peter McEvoy, those involved in making the programme often felt that RTE management was nervous enough about what they were doing, but they never intervened and the programme always proceeded with a free hand. The politicians may have been unhappy and may indeed have complained, but they would have placed themselves in a ridiculous situation, if it ever came to libel suits, in the act of identifying themselves with ludicrous fictional characters. 38

Satire was not the only mode of dramatic response to the character of political life in contemporary Ireland. It was, however, the only arena in which the politics of contemporary Ireland, at least of the Republic of Ireland, received up front, center stage dramatic treatment. Otherwise anything that was so explicitly political was only present as a subtext or else it was either set in the past or set in the north.

There were strong subtextual currents giving a more sober look at the darker side of the political culture of the southern state. They were really only glimpses, but they were often pictures which struck a resonating chord and left a lingering impression. Reinforcing a growing cynicism about politicians, there were the images of the cynical and opportunist Paco Kelly TD, the parliamentary secretary in The Spike and the ambitious and amoral Willie Burke, the up-and-coming politician come night-club-owner, symbolising certain lines of connection between criminal and political activities in The Burke Enigma. In one of the rare televisual images of a left wing activist, there was the combat-jacketted maoist in A Week in the Life of Martin Cluxton, whose politics of class struggle was undercut by its status as impotent pub talk. In a less pessimistic vein, there were the ongoing activities of Tom Riordan in his continuing role as a county councillor in The Riordans. However, most of the drama of contemporary politics was preoccupied with Northern Ireland. Some of it was set in the south, dealing with the spillover effect of the current 'troubles' in the country as a whole. Sometimes it was incidental and soft-centred as in the 1974 episodes of The Riordans, when children from the violent north were brought down to the more peaceful south for the Christmas season of good will. However, in 1978, after The Riordans had moved from serial to series form, it took a harder look at the choices posed by the north to those adhering to republican traditions in the south. In an episode called The Class of 64, the centre of dramatic confrontation was in the dilemma of Benjy Riordan, when he found himself torn between his past principles and his present compromises. The conflict emerged in a particularly acute form, when Stevie, an old college friend, came seeking help as a wounded IRA man on the run, and when Maggie, despite the dangers of non-co-operation, persisted in her uncompromising hostility to the armed campaign. To Stevie, Benjy represented betrayal. As he put it to him:

 "Nothing like a wife and child and a few hundred acres to change your principles”.

Of course, credibility and identification could also be established, although differently, in shorter series and single plays. In other forms as well, there was an attempt to mobilise these in relation to the human dimensions of the northern situation. The Spike had also attempted to portray the divergent paths taken by those in the south who had felt called upon to make choices in relation to the north and to face the consequences of their republican principles in their own lives. The episode concerning the idealistic student turned IRA volunteer, who was blown to bits at the border, and the idealistic teacher turned coward and cynic the first time his beliefs came under any pressure, failed to reach its audience at all. Even if it had been broadcast, it would almost surely have failed to establish credibility or identification, because of its serious deficiencies in characterisation.

A more substantial piece challenging southern attitudes to the northern strife was Alun Owen's play Passing Through. The plot concerned the catalytic effect of the presence of an outsider asking questions of the locals, amidst the niceties of Dublin's suburban lounge bar culture. Peter Field, a high flying international news correspondent, moving from one of the world's war zones to another, was passing through Dublin on his way to Belfast. He insistently probed beneath the surface pleasantries and asked people to state their point of view, when they wished only to skirt around the edges of a subject or to avoid it altogether and get on with a bit of light craic. Not that Field was above the craic. It was just that he got his kicks by turning over stones to see what would crawl out. He persistently pushed all and sundry to declare their political allegiances, in an atmosphere in which this had heretofore been studiously avoided. One by one, he stormed their defences:

Peter: "How do you feel about a united Ireland?”

Will: "You're joking. I don't talk politics in bars.”

Peter: "No? Well you should. You're an Irish American and your people pump a lot of money into this country that winds up as guns. So I think I'm entitled to ask”.

Peter: “ Just how far is Belfast from where we are now?”

Liam:  "100 odd miles.”

Peter: "I' d have thought it more like a thousand, there's not much mention of it around here. “

Liam: "Why would there be? Don't we get it in the papers, on the telly, on the wireless, sure there's no escaping it. We all know it's there. Jaysus, they wouldn't let you forget it, but I don't feel inclined to ruin my Sunday morning jar over a pack of mad dogs killing each other above. If I was to worry about anything, it' d be making sure it don't come down here.”

Peter: "So, right off, what's your answer to this mess in the north?”

Dick: "I think like we all think when we're honest with ourselves. I wish you and your soldiers would get to buggery out of our country and leave it to us. We'll settle it. Are you answered?”

Peter: "You've a point, but what about all the innocent that might get killed?”

Dick: (Dismissively) "Oh, for Jaysus sake, will they amount to any more than the guilty that are going at the moment?”

After a bit of diversion and one of the group singing under his breath "Glorio, glorio to the bold fenian men", the exchange flared up again:

Dick: "I've never heard so much codology in me life. You're going there with a set of attitudes as rigid as railway lines without points”

Peter: "And so far as I'm concerned, you haven't got an original idea on the subject, just a set of inherited, insular, provincial prejudices that have no relationship to the contemporary world which you seem determined not to live in.”

Jolyon: "Dick, you must make allowances for a situation that's defied solution for ten years.”

Dick: "Ten years is it? Eight hundred and ten more like.“

Peter: "You're talking ancient history, man.”

Eamonn: "Can you not agree to disagree?”

Dick: "That's you, Eamonn, anything for a quiet life and a merc in the garage. I give up.”

Peter: "I wish a few more of your countrymen would,”

Dick: "You've no need of worries there. Most of hem have, just pray it'll go away or at least sweep it under the carpet.”

Peter: "This is a hell of a country, but seemingly you take it in your stride.”

Jolyon: "I'm a bit lazy about social attitudes and refrain from shouting ‘to hell with the pope’ on the quays.”

 Dai: I'm apolitical, always have been.”

 Peter: “one is, except politicians”.

Peter: “ you've managed to make your selfishness seem a virtue. This country's perfect for you. There's no edge or worry about the place. It's ostrich land, perfect for you, Dai, but not much use to me in what I'll be looking for.”

Will: “ Well, I'll give you this. You certainly managed to stroke the complacent cat's fur the wrong way.”

Revealing as it was about certain types of foreigners resident in Ireland, the real point of the play was to use their presence to counterpoint the manners and mores of the natives. As seen by Louis Lentin, who, as head of drama, commissioned the work for RTE:

“Alun Owen uses this situation to present a recognisable and telling picture, not of the foreigners, but of the local Irish and their wives, of the lip service that permeates so much of Irish society at all levels. Who fears to speak of '98 can be sung and sung loudly, but who bothers to really speak of anything? Of the North? Of 68-79? Anybody? Field may be a troublemaker, but at least he speaks to the point. Ireland of the welcomes is all very well... on the wall.” 39

Of course, most of the drama dealing with the north was set in the north. There was, first of all, the 1970 revival of Sam Thompson's controversial 1960 play Over the Bridge, which the troubles had made more topical than ever. Taking advantage of the new production of the play on the stages of the Lyric (Belfast) and the Gaiety (Dublin), Chloe Gibson arranged for an RTE production in the same year. Drawing on his own experience as a worker and trade union activist in the Belfast shipyards, Sam Thompson turned to dramatised portrayal to highlight the strident sectarianism within the shipyards and the dilemma it posed for the trade union movement. In a confrontation between an anti-sectarian trade union leader and an orange rabble rouser, with most of the rank and file foundering on the fences, the tension built to a shattering climax, when the trade union leader was beaten to death by the men he had so conscientiously served, creating a vivid symbol of the brutal tragedy of the situation.

Another play which had come from the Belfast stage was John Boyd's The Flats. Set in strife-torn Belfast in 1970, it adopted a semi-documentary style, recording in a matter-of-fact way the immediate realities of familial and tribal upheaval, in the escalating cycle of hostility prevailing at the time, in an attempt to convey the essential tragedy of the situation in a particular sort of way. Although from a protestant background, the author focused the drama on a catholic family, whose home was in the middle of the firing line. Within the Donellan household, the conflict centred on the militant involvement of father and son in the local citizens defence committee, against the wishes of mother and daughter. It captured the claustrophobia, the squalor and the sense of siege enveloping the world of Unity Flats. It communicated a sense of the communal disruption and dispossession as experienced on the ground.

Set in Glasgow flats was another stage play bearing on the northern conflict given a television production by RTE. On one level, The Sash by Hector McMillan was a Romeo and Juliet love story across the orange and green divide. A young woman, pregnant and nerve shattered, had come to stay with her aunt in Glasgow for a bit of peace and solace away from the strife of Belfast, only to be confronted with the 12th of July belligerence of the Glasgow variety of bigoted orangemen. Her aunt, Miss Shaughnessy, was a strident foe of protestant triumphalism, symbolised primarily by her neighbour in the flat below. Bill McWilliam was big, bragging, boozy orangeman, who believed:

 "If you give the taigs an inch, they'll be over us like that”

 "Yet all the blood we both have drawn
 'Twas red, not orange or green.”

It was a play with a message and a clearly left of centre one at that:

 "Tell them to hell with orange and green.
 Match your banner to the colour of your common blood.”

Not relying entirely on adaptation, however, RTE produced four original written-for-television plays set in the north, all by Eugene McCabe. The earliest, made in 1970, was The Funeral. It was basically the story of an ill-starred and isolated gentleman farmer, Cecil Maxwell, who reluctantly decided to attend the funeral of a catholic neighbour, thereby bringing upon himself the blackest crisis of his bleak life. Underneath the hearty and smiling welcome, he sensed the daggers. He was, for the author, the vehicle for his elegy for the rural Anglo-Irish, who had failed to adapt.

The most distinguished achievement of RTE in this area was its award winning production of McCabe's Victims trilogy of the mid-seventies. It was a new departure for RTE in the scale and style of its production and was filmed on location in colour. All three plays were set in the present in the same part of Northern Ireland, the rural farmlands of South Fermanagh, involving crucial episodes in the lives of a loosely inter-related set of characters. A minor character in one story would be a major character in the next and vice versa. There was a definite build-up in the nature of the tension in each story.

The first story, Cancer, centred on the lives of two elderly bachelor brothers living in a derelict small farm. The play opened with overhead shots of an idyllic countryside, almost as if a travelogue panorama, with a similarly engaging musical sound track. This idyll was quickly shattered, however, first by RTE news of  northern troubles on the car radio, then by the army helicopter and then by the discovery that the two men in the car were travelling to visit one's brother in hospital dying of cancer. Cancer, through the play, functioned both literally as the physical disease killing one man's body and metaphorically as the psycho-social disease killing the soul of both a particular man and a whole community. Dinny McMahon, with all of his spitting, venomous bigotry, was portrayed as in fact sicker than his brother Joady with terminal cancer. In every possible situation, Dinny was growling and grumbling at the British Army, at the UDR, at his protestant neighbours, at his catholic neighbours, even at his dying brother. Even their catholic neighbours saw the protestant caricature of catholics embodied in them. With nothing to do all day but draw the dole and sit by the fire, they couldn't even manage to wash themselves or keep their house decent. Whatever their hostility to protestants, it wasn't as if they were really even catholics, with never a mass or any other religious practice. At the same time, whatever their anti-establishment rumblings and the implication that they were communists, a neighbour made it clear that she knew what real communists would do with the likes of them.

The second story, Heritage, traced the growing crisis, building out of more overtly political forces, in the lives of a protestant family of working farmers and part-time soldiers in the UDR. The tension centred on the situation of Eric O'Neill, 21 year old farmer and UDR member, living under the same roof as his estranged parents. Torn asunder, being pushed and pulled from all sides by people with conflicting points of view and by forces he could neither comprehend nor control, he was without definite beliefs, without clear loyalties, without a firm centre from which he could sort it all out and hold his ground. Within his community, within his own family, within his own soul, the contending forces bore down upon him, bringing increasing confusion and terror. Within the community, he felt all around him the sinister presence of the anonymous killers, who had him on their death list, everywhere watching, waiting, scraping, clawing, gorging like rats. Yet he thought of the catholic neighbours he knew, all good, hard working people.  He saw as well the sinister side of the protestant community of which he was a part. He listened to their talk of blind hatred and looked around the church full of loving tributes to violent death. Yet there were those he cared for, particularly Rachel, nurse and neighbour who cared for him as well. Within his family, he had given in to pressure from his mother and uncle to join the UDR, however alienated he felt from their hard, hating, humourless, sexless, black sectarianism. He felt a sympathy for the position of his father, who did not wish him to join the UDR and did his best to stand clear of sectarian divisions. His father had come in the previous story to visit Joady McMahon, his catholic neighbour who was dying. His attitude was:

 "If one neighbour in ten thousand wants to kill me or mine, I'll not hate them all for that one”.

Within himself was the worst conflict, a conflict that froze him in impotence, a conflict he felt unable to resolve, a conflict that brought him to the worst cowardice of all: the inability to choose, the inability to respond, the inability to act. He saw himself as afraid of his uncle, afraid of his mother, afraid to choose between his father and his mother, afraid of catholics, afraid of protestants, afraid to love, afraid to hate, afraid to live and afraid to die. He saw himself as standing for nothing, as risking his life for something he didn't believe in or even understand:

 "I dunno why I'm in this uniform, who I'm fighting, or what the fight’s about I'd as lief be dead.”

There were many dimensions to McCabe's way of telling this story of the twenty four hours leading to the death of this young man. Underneath the particularities of the events were estimable insights into psychological processes and into sociological forces. Especially interesting was his treatment of the way in which sectarian tensions were connected to stunted personal development in general and sexual paralysis in particular. In the case of Eric's parents, both gave him their versions of their relationship. According to his mother, she had kept her marriage vows, reared his sons and kept his house for a man who treated her with a cruel silence and used her 'unnatural' from the start.

According to his father, he had never heard her laugh, nor ever seen her body for the whole of their thirty years together. In his view, she hated bodies, both her own and his. She could live on black bread and water, the bible and hating catholics. In the case of his uncle, his blind bigotry had made him sexless, living all his life in a womanless house, just as the two brothers on the other side of the divide in the previous story did. In the case of Eric himself, he loved Rachel and she loved him, yet he could hardly kiss her without embarrassment and awkwardness. When she reached out to him painfully and asked him why he had never really touched her, he could not respond, frightened even more of her mind than her body. When she begged him for comfort in her shattered grief when her father and brother were killed, he was hopelessly inadequate.

Also interesting was his glimpse behind the sectarian conflict on the ground to the larger structure of power keeping everything as it was. In a play for some sort of lucidity, Eric's father asked:

"What's he fighting for, woman? God and country? The queen?  I'll tell you what he's fighting for! The big boys who splash more on weekends whoring than he'll make in a lifetime... there's goms who'll die to keep them at it. That's your cause, son... pound notes, millions of them, and the men who have them don't care a tinker's curse who kills who as long as they keep their grip, and if that's coward's talk, I'll stay one.”

The third story, Siege dealt with even more overtly political forces in even more explicit confrontation. Opening at the Inver show with the union jack flying overhead and the strains of Land of Hope and Glory  blaring from the loudspeakers, members of the Provisional IRA mingled in the crowd and stalked their prey. Amongst the locals, there was talk of George Hawthorne’s being released, after being questioned in connection with a double murder, and of the rumours that his nephew Eric O'Neill's death at an army checkpoint had been suicide. George was nevertheless as blustering as ever in his bigotry. Meanwhile, in Monaghan, the IRA unit came together to be briefed in the McAleer home, full of the kitsch iconography of  catholic nationalism: the sacred heart, the madonna, Patrick Pearse, the two Johns: Kennedy and Roncalli, and Lourdes water. In a sickroom smelling of fish and lysol was the prototypical  catholic mother, thanking God every day for her three green fields and two strong sons.

The IRA unit selected by the army council for this special mission was a determined, but divided, group. There were Mrs. McAleer's two strong sons, Pascal and Pacelli, played as comic tweedledum and tweedledee figures in black berets, in a way that was out of key with the production as a whole. They were meant to be atavistic creatures, who killed as ritualistically as they prayed, who carried out the orders of the army council in the same way as they participated in the holy sacrifice of the mass. Their mother had decreed they had a score to settle for their father and for all the dead generations and so be it. They were, as the dominant mother figure typically wanted her sons to be, brave clean living and sexless boys. Their mother was proud to say of them:

 "they've got nerve, don't smoke, don't drink, don't interfere with girls.”

Martin Leonard, the commanding officer of the group, was quite different again. There was an authority in his presence that created an aura of determination, discipline and detachment, an air about him that did not easily reveal the doubts, the fears, the dilemmas. He had killed before, though unlike Gallagher, he had never seen the face of a victim, nor did he welcome the prospect. He took no joy in killing and often awoke in a sweat after hearing screaming and seeing images of what he had done. He was, in McCabe's words, a tired priest of violence who had ceased to believe in the creed.  As seen by Kevin McHugh, who played the part, his will to believe had eroded, though he was still committed to carrying through a programme in which he no longer believed. He was efficient, but jaded. 42 He no longer had clear answers for the why and wherefore of it all, but he was proceeding and commanding nonetheless. Sexually, he was more of a mystery than the rest. All that was clear was that he exercised restraint, did not let it distract him from the tasks at hand and was able to deal with a woman without sexually baiting her, again unlike Gallagher.

The woman most at issue was Isabel Lynam, the fifth member of the group, another character of a certain complexity. A high profile ideologue of the movement (modelled on Maria Maguire who played this sort of role in the Provisional IRA in the early seventies), she was attracted to men of violence, while at the same time distrusting them and being distrusted by them. She was the only member of the group who had never killed before. She had freely chosen to stand with the men of vivid words and violent action in contrast to the hollow crafty manoeuverings of politicians like her father, a TD. She had found it easy enough to propagate violence from a platform, but found it

"different now that it prowled to her side, the bloody midwife of regeneration, a ruthless animal with dripping mouth and glassy merciless eyes.”

 “Are you a communist, child?”

"Too much learnin' is the ruination of the world. All a body needs is faith in God, his blessed mother, faith in your people and faith in your country.”

The plan was to go to the big house and to hold the gentlefolk and their guests hostage until three specified comrades were released from Long Kesh. Inver Hall was the home of Col. Armstrong, a retired British Army officer and member of the landed aristocracy, who had considered himself above the battle. His captors, however, considered his ambivalence as insidious as the bigotry of his compatriots and reminded themselves that the wealth, power and privilege of his like had been gained by force and fraud, even If sanctioned by the rule of law and pulpit. On his side, however, it seemed:

"all so unfair. We were never absentees. My grandfather cut rents to half and nil during the famine, mortgaged the estate to feed tenants, catholic and protestant, one of my cousins signed the treaty for the Irish side...”

 "The cancer is in the room and may kill us shortly.”

"We never employed papists, family tradition. They all cheat, lie and thieve, careless, superstitious, stupid. When you hear this from the nursery onwards, right or wrong, it tends to stick.”

"To the Irish, no one else. What they've done down there in 60 years is not in doubt: ruined Dublin, painted pillar boxes green and produced more lunatics and alcoholics per square mile than other country in the world. This is a proven fact.”

In a series of exchanges between the captured and their captors, there were various forays into exploring the ground that united and divided the assembled company. There was first the shock of recognition between Millicent and Isabel who realised they had been at Trinity College together. The dialogue between them quickly passed from awkward recognition to sharp accusation:

 Millicent: "Impassioned at debate, I remember. I listened then, I'll listen now.”
 Isabel: "This is not a college debate”

Isabel: "I find their faces less horrific than the painted ones round your walls.”

Millicent: "You can maim, cripple, blind the innocent. For what?”

Isabel: "You've never been colonised. You wouldn't understand.”

Millicent: "I can try  if you can explain.”

Isabel: "I don't have to.”

Millicent: "You can't. You've had your student pub crawls, your bedsit affairs, hitched about and got stoned. So now you're a graduate. Work's a bore. What next? Backroom politics with mindless killers. A taste of terror before you die. It's beyond contempt.”

Isabel: "When you stop killing us, we'll stop killing you. It's as simple as that.”

Millicent: "What have I - we - got to do with killing you?”

Isabel: "Everything.”

 "Do you think there's any hope for peace in our time, sir?”

“When we look for common rights the way you got your empire, all your lackeys in the press and commons yap: hang them, hang them. Mother of  parliaments? A fat knacker's wife who's flayed half the bloody world. Your mock monarchy and zoo-keeping dukes and public schools, all stiff upper prick and regiments of back-street rats and buggering  horatios. You have deported, degraded, starved and tortured us and still do and no apology and never will, but smirk and snigger at stupid Paddy, dirty Paddy.”

“To what? Chicken in the rough? Non-stop reels of jig-jig trash? The great, great show with endless whining lamentations manufactured by jackeens for plough boys and shop girls. “

“Bachelor? Should it not be spinster of arts? Sounds miserable. Dog's nice; who likes bitch? Bulls are magnificent; cow's stupid. Boars fierce; sows eat their young. The language itself is perverse to the female. Men only. We re under sentence and the BBC don't know we exist.”

Although the scripts in the trilogy were richly-textured and multi-layered texts, with nuances not always adequately captured by the production, the trilogy was nevertheless a most impressive contribution to creating a culture true to its time and a fine achievement both for the author and for RTE. Michael Garvey, the head of drama at the time, regarded it as a "gothic achievement". 43 Wesley Burrowes, who played a part in initiating the project and editing the work of his fellow writer, considered it one of the best things RTE ever did and felt it confirmed McCabe as the "best writer we have". 44  Cancer won the script award for the author at the International Film Festival in Prague and a Jacobs award for the director, Deirdre Friel.

It was to RTE's credit that, whatever its limited resources, it gave such emphasis to dramatic treatment of the northern conflict. British television, in contrast, did not, at least not in the 1970s, nor were they interested in buying in the McCabe trilogy. Considering the estimable resources of British television and the sheer amount of television drama, home produced and imported, dealing with so many other problems, both near and far, there would seem to be a certain dereliction of duty in this regard. It took until the 1980s for British television drama to come through in this respect.

Addressing himself to this situation in 1980, Richard Hoggart wrote in The Listener  that only nineteen plays in twelve years had dealt with the 'troubles', whether about Northern Ireland itself or about the effects in Britain. Anything on the troubles, he pointed out, was regarded as very sensitive and involved reference upwards, discussion, delay, denial of repeats or relegation to late night slots. Most drama that made it through, in his opinion, used stock characters and stock attitudes, with the result that the audience was denied the help of drama in coming to terms with the complexity of the situation. There was not so much direct censorship as indirect censorship, arising from the fact that Northern Ireland was considered a switch off subject or a dangerous one.45

Northern Ireland did occasionally get a look in. For example, in the 1976 Thames series Bill Brand on the political and personal life of a left-wing Labour MP, there was an episode giving a fair degree of attention to the passage through parliament of a further prevention of terrorism bill. Although a government backbencher, he put forward an amendment to reduce the period in which a suspect could be detained without being charged from ten days to three, bringing him into conflict both with his own party and with the opposition who wanted to raise the period from ten days to fourteen. In a wide ranging attack on the erosion of democratic freedoms and on the capitalist system itself, Brand stressed that the politics of terror was a bankrupt politics, but challenged those heckling him and going on about 'men of blood' to consider all men of blood, including currency speculators who murdered by telephone. As to what to do about Ireland, Brand insisted:

"The problem of Ireland will not be solved