Introduction to the Special Issue: Contemporary Irish Television

Hermes and Hill (2020, 5) have highlighted how, during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, television internationally recovered a social centrality as a “platform for cultural citizenship,” a “space in which to think about, reflect on and (re)form identities that are embedded in communities of different kinds, both existing in real life and virtually.” In Ireland, national public service broadcaster RTÉ was an exemplary instance. The weekly Late Late Show (RTÉ, 1962-) ritually celebrated the collective national effort in suppressing the spread of the virus during the Government imposed lockdown, and acted as a fulcrum connecting government, various national organizations and local volunteer efforts. These included privatized national airline Aer Lingus, whose pilots, having flown Personal Protective Equipment from China, were featured in a special edition; and Ireland’s largest sporting organization, the amateur Gaelic Athletic Association, whose members contributed extensively to charitable drives and in assisting vulnerable groups. RTÉ also provided daily educational broadcasts for primary school children. In June 2020 it boasted that 90% of the population availed of its television service during lockdown, that streaming via its online player rose 70% and that Late Late Show viewing by fifteen to thirty-four year olds, increasingly inclined more towards SVOD platforms (Mediatique 2019), rose by 94% (RTÉ 2020).

RTÉ’s recent prominence among Irish media during lockdown contrasts somewhat with doubts concerning its viability in November 2019. Despite dominating the television landscape in the Republic of Ireland since launching in 1962, the broadcaster reported catastrophic losses from a 2007 revenue peak (Slattery 2019). The losses were attributed to part-funding by a license fee whose rate is unchanged since 2007, extensive license fee evasion and a fall in advertising revenue due to increased competition from the advertising funded Virgin channels. SVOD services such as Netflix have further impacted loss of market share, as have the cross-border availability of Northern Ireland’s ITV franchise UTV and BBC Northern Ireland. RTÉ’s proposed license fee replacement (a “Public Service Broadcasting Charge” irrespective of television set ownership) will not commence until 2024.

The political context for RTÉ’s travails was the “Celtic Tiger” boom from the mid-1990s to 2007, following which Ireland was acutely affected by the 2008 global financial crisis. A €67.5 billion “bailout” of Irish banks (Mercille and Murphy 2015, 50) was followed by severe austerity measures. Negra and McIntyre (2020, 2) encapsulate the current socio-political landscape as “governmental facilitation of tax avoidance by multinational corporations, the hollowing out of public services, the return of youth economic emigration, intensified elite/underclass divisions and a burgeoning housing crisis.” Successive governments’ reluctance to address RTÉ’s financial difficulties typifies this “hollowing out.”

The combination of RTÉ’s centrality to the government’s Covid-19 “stay at home” message and the unsympathetic political response to its financial woes in 2019 (Leahy 2019) illustrates a persistently contradictory political attitude to the national broadcaster exemplified by the Fine Gael led government’s 2018 Audio-Visual Action Plan for the screen industries in Ireland. The latter derived from Creative Ireland, the “implementation vehicle” (Creative Ireland Programme 2016, 7) for Culture 2025, an arts development programme billed as the “Legacy Programme” for the 2016 commemoration of the 1916 Rising, the failed revolution that led ultimately to Irish independence from Britain in 1922. Creative Ireland referred both to the “imagination” of the revolutionary leaders as inspiration for a “culture-based programme designed to promote individual, community and national wellbeing,” and the aim to attract inward media and cultural investment in Ireland as a “Centre of Excellence in Media Production.” It referred directly to a policy of “nation branding” aimed at “Unifying our Global Reputation” (Creative Ireland Programme 2016, 29). A cliched promotional video vacuously proclaimed Ireland “an unbounded state of mind”, the “republic of creativity.” ¹ The emphasis on national branding, the use of tax incentives to attract inward investment, and the lack of material support for RTÉ (named there as a key agency), exemplifies the strange combination of diluted cultural nationalist rhetoric and neoliberal solutions in center-right dominated Irish politics.

Flynn and Tracy (2017, 253) argue that 2016 saw a heightened globalization of film and television production in Ireland and contraction of production aimed at specifically Irish audiences. In the first half of that year RTÉ scheduled an “unprecedented quantity (and quality) of material dealing with the historical origins of an independent Ireland.” By the second half of 2016, with its domestic commercial competitor Virgin (formerly TV3) an exemplar of an “apparently irreversible shift towards globalized ownership and formats,” RTÉ was clearly adjusting to a worsening financial situation through transnational co-production and by imitating such transnational formats.

RTÉ’s record as a public service broadcaster has been somewhat mixed. Horgan and Flynn (2017, 104) highlight its progressive, modernizing influence through its “incremental, sometimes contested attempt to modify the context within which Irish social issues were discussed” and dramatized in the highly conservative Ireland of the 1960s and ‘70s. RTÉ’s broadcasting of documentaries by Louis Lentin and Mary Raftery in the 1990s and 2000s (McKeogh and O’Connell 2012, 66–76, 151–6) exposed the extent of abuses committed in Catholic Church run carceral institutions over decades, and led to government commissioned reports published in 2009. Such work contributed to the progressive disentanglement of Church and state that were key to the 2015 Marriage Equality and 2018 Abortion Constitutional referendums and legislative reforms. However, since 2008 the structural causes of the crisis and the unevenly felt social impact of “no alternative” austerity measures have not been subjected to extensive, sustained scrutiny by the national broadcaster. Negra et al.’s (2019) analysis of RTÉ’s generally uncritical representation of emigration post-2008 highlights its shortcomings in this regard.

The articles here address the interplay between contemporary Irish television and the political, economic and cultural context of recent decades. The primary focus on RTÉ programming highlights and facilitates interrelated critical appraisals of how it has variously responded to its challenges as a public service broadcaster seeking to promote national inclusivity and represent diversity in an increasingly competitive Anglophone media landscape, a devoutly neoliberal political and economic environment, and a country where institutional abuses and the 2008 crash have destabilized the narrative of national cohesiveness and destiny underpinning its foundation. The focus might be questioned for perpetuating the narrowly nationalist concerns of Irish television studies (Brennan 2019); and for its concern with “legacy” media in a “disruptive” multi-platform/ portal era in television’s evolution (Shahaf and Ferrari 2019). However, the articles illustrate how, as Lotz (2018, 491) observes, “as compelling a case can be made for continuity” as “disruption” in television as “the pre-existing technologies, industrial formations, governmental policies and practices of looking also persist.”

We commence with Anna McCarthy’s study of a constant in RTÉ’s daily schedule since 1962, the 6 pm ringing of the Angelus bells, a traditional call to prayer in the Catholic Church. Until 1998 the bells were accompanied by images depicting the Annunciation of the “Immaculate Conception” of the Virgin Mary, including, in the mid-1990s, images submitted by and occasionally created by viewers. Drawing on examples and correspondence from RTÉ’s archives McCarthy considers the challenges of interpreting viewer submitted images, given their sometimes provocative ambiguity, and in the context of the socio-cultural changes underway in the 1990s as the Church’s authority was being challenged, not least through the medium of television.

A seemingly strange anachronism in a progressively secularizing country, the Angelus’ history on Irish television illustrates broader changes in RTÉ’s religious programming and its relationship with an enduring religious sensibility in Ireland. RTÉ’s long running religious series Would You Believe? (2005-) has responded to the progressive “undoing” (Fuller 2004) of Irish Catholicism’s hegemony with programmes addressing Church abuse scandals, pedophilia and the Catholic Church’s control of almost 90% of Irish primary schools (RTÉ 2017). Yet, as McCarthy explores here, through mutation and variety RTÉ’s programming has contributed to sustaining a religious orientation within the Irish cultural imagination. That a 2018 poll found that 68% approved retaining the Angelus as a televisual ritual (RTÉ 2018) may show the influence of the move, in 2009, towards non-religious accompanying images, for the bells, of people pausing, presumably for “spiritual” reflection. The gradual move from a focus on Church as institution towards the nebulous theme of “spirituality” in religious programming was also exemplified by veteran broadcaster Gay Byrne’s interviews with Irish and international celebrities on The Meaning of Life (RTÉ 2009–16), and former Irish President Mary McAleese’s walks with Irish celebrities along ancient Irish pilgrimage routes, All Walks of Life (2020). These explorations of spirituality infuse the secular with a religious sensibility, even if religious belief is only vaguely acknowledged or actively repudiated by participants. All Walks of Life, for instance echoes poet and former priest John O’Donohue’s popular writing on how “elemental forces . . . inform and elevate subjectivity” in “Celtic” and early Irish Christian “spirituality” (O’Donohue 1997, 23). RTÉ’s validation of, and contribution to the endurance of formal and diffuse religious belief in Ireland chimes with Inglis’s (2008) sociological encapsulation of the “plus ca change” contradictions of contemporary Ireland in the aptly titled Global Ireland: Same Difference.

The second article, by Ruth Barton, concerns The Fall (2013–2016), a BBC/RTÉ co-produced drama series. Among the most internationally circulated and discussed of Irish-set dramas, The Fall divided critics. Many challenged its “feminist” credentials, highlighting its problematic visually eroticized scenes in which a serial killer poses and photographs his strangled female victims. Barton explores the series’ hitherto neglected “Irish” dimensions, focusing on its thinly sketched references to the Northern Ireland “Troubles” and belated discovery of the murderer’s backstory of abuse in a Catholic-run children’s home. This becomes an unconvincing “dark past” explanation of motive that neither furthers understanding of the character’s misogyny nor engages with the history and cultural legacy of institutional abuse.

More broadly, Barton’s analysis highlights the problems with recourse to cultural cliché and easy legibility in geographically specific dramas orientated towards international markets. Showing the influence, formally and aesthetically, of “Scandi-noir,” The Fall illustrates RTÉ’s (and its competitor Virgin’s) growing involvement in the globalized environment of transnational co-commissioning and production. As Flynn (2020, 301) observes, the involvement of such companies as Acorn TV, an aspirant “second-tier streaming service based around British material” or “material with a UK feel” in the US is increasingly a prerequisite for the commissioning of “high end” Irish-set drama. Series like Blood (Virgin, 2018), Dublin Murders (BBC, Starz, RTÉ, 2019) and The Deceived (Virgin, 2020) predictably draw on the “transnational legibility” of the “paradoxical gender-based violence and female empowerment” combination (Coulthard et al. 2018, 507) so central to contemporary crime drama. A noteworthy exception to “vague generalities of place, in the interests of exportability” (Sweeney 2020, 238) in such dramas, and despite reiterating this “paradoxical combination,” was RTÉ’s (2018) Taken Down. Co-commissioned with ARTE in France, a racially diverse cast (unique in an Irish context) featured in a female-led investigation of the murder of a migrant Nigerian woman in Dublin. The foregrounded context in this case was Ireland’s much criticized “direct provision” system for asylum seekers and the sex trafficking of migrant women, the policing of which is rated among the weakest in Europe (Horgan-Jones 2020).

Páiric Kerrigan’s article on contemporary Irish queer television considers RTÉ’s commissioning of a range of innovative programming exploring the cultural politics of gender and sexuality in Ireland since the 2015 Marriage Equality referendum. Mulhall (2015) argues that the 2015 “yes” campaign borrowed “heavily from an established North American lexicon of same-sex marriage as an instrument of neoliberal governance” in appealing to “straight” voters in “middle Ireland.” By “humanizing” gay Minister for Health (and future Taoiseach/Prime Minister) Leo Varadkar the campaign did “the State some pinkwashing service” following years of punitive austerity. While acknowledging RTÉ’s contribution to the construction of a “homonormative” post-referendum “model marriage equality citizen,” Kerrigan shows how some of its documentary and drama output has critically examined the unevenness of LGBTQ experiences, exploring, for instance, the diversity of trans identities and experiences, the bio-psychological challenges of transitioning, and rural isolation.

The latter exemplify a commendably progressive commissioning policy, in key respects, on the part of RTÉ. In 2018, for example, the year of the Abortion referendum, the centenary of women winning the right to vote, the middle of the “decade of commemorations” of the revolutionary years leading to independence, and two years after the #WakingTheFeminists protest against the Abbey Theatre’s male dominated programme to commemorate the 1916 Rising, Anne Roper’s two-part documentary for RTÉ, No Country for Women was a significant RTÉ broadcast. Critically examining the impact of the post-independence Constitution, legislation, policing and carceral institutions on women’s experiences of work, domesticity, sexual abuse and reproduction, it interconnected extensively with current Irish feminist scholarship (e.g., Frawley 2021).

However, such instances notwithstanding, the final articles highlight the weaknesses of Irish television’s engagement with social inequality in Ireland, specifically the generational dimensions of spatialized social and economic inequality post-2008. Coulter and Arqueros-Fernández (2020, 102) argue that the narrative of economic “recovery” in Ireland widely promoted since 2013 depends on misleading “headline” GDP figures fueled by multinational registering of profits. The high proportion of low wage jobs and a 70% rise in rents from 2013 to 2018 have exacerbated the crash’s uneven impact across generations, increasingly irrespective of class origins. Anthony McIntyre shows how RTÉ’s “property television” shows, including “lifestyle programmes” focused on home improvement, ostensibly address the challenges facing younger viewers in their concerns with house-hunting, affordable rent and property purchase. However, such programmes preach a neoliberal doctrine of actual, or aspiration towards, self-sufficiency and embrace of no-alternative “capitalist realism” (Fisher 2009). Their pragmatic, self-actualized solutions for a generation at the mercy of rentiers are symptomatic of the financialization of life in Ireland as property becomes increasingly absorbed into transnational financial flows and cycles.

Eleanor O’Leary extends the concern with Irish television’s partial acknowledgment of the worsening plight for younger generations, focusing particularly on how intergenerational continuity, affective and material support are presented as factors that might mitigate employment, housing and maturational challenges. The case study programmes (drawn from RTÉ and its commercial rival Virgin) evince a remarkable endurance of the idealization of family in Irish society despite its repressive history (Conrad 2004); and an emphasis on contiguity—attachment visually manifested as touch—as metonymic of intergenerational continuity, a nation “holding on.” The intergenerational theme plays out both intra-familially and extra-familially, in some instances, as older people facing isolation are matched with potentially complementary younger people seeking affordable accommodation in reciprocal arrangements. Drawing on Berlant (2011), O’Leary argues that “resigned pragmatism” combines here with management of diminished expectations. Like McIntyre, she highlights the inadequacy of such forms of ideological reassurance in a context of deteriorating material conditions.

RTÉ’s repeated framing of the national as a family audience (a tendency Kerrigan also notes in LGBTQ programming) seems strangely anachronistic as television audiences and tastes have been fragmenting. Despite the possibly temporary boost during the 2020 pandemic, RTÉ’s audiences are clearly ageing. A Mediatique (2019, 74) report for the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland suggested it was “super-serving” its “older demographics.” Its financial resources are shrinking as its competitive media environment complexifies, and its future viability is in doubt. Its efforts to maintain an integral view of the nation-as-family are strained by social, economic and cultural inequalities increasingly registered politically as a generational shift leftward among younger voters mirrors developments internationally (Milburn 2019). In the February 2020 election the leftist Sinn Féin party emerged with the largest percentage of the vote, highest among younger voters, but was excluded from the Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael/Green Party negotiations leading to their center-right coalition government forming in June 2020.

Together, the five articles here offer important critical insights into how Ireland’s embattled public service broadcaster has negotiated the recent changes within Irish society and its own increasingly precarious positioning within it. They highlight both the value and weaknesses of a national public service broadcaster following two major crises, cultural and socio-economic, since 1990, with a further, perhaps transformative crisis resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic still unfolding.