Housewife of the Year - RTÉ looks back on 1980's Ireland

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The look back programme is a tried and tested staple of television. Indeed, with the summer schedules now upon us, Irish viewers will once again be bracing themselves for even more repeat showings of RTÉ’s own Reeling In The Years.

It may well have been in this spirit that RTÉ recently broadcast Housewife of the Year (A Little Wing production in association with RTÉ), a look back on the Ireland of the 1980’s and 90’s and its social mores.

The Housewife of the Year competition ran from 1967 to 1995 and, as it says on the can, was a celebration of all that was wholesome about the Irish housewife. The competition was big news in its heyday attracting sponsors such as Calor gas and also featuring as a television spectacle with none less than Gay Byrne as MC for many years.

In this context, the recently broadcast Housewife of the Year promised a whimsical look back on an Ireland of 30 to 40 years ago. The attractiveness of the look back genre is that, quite apart from the content, the gauche hairstyles and cringey fashions usually form a sort of parallel entertainment show in their own rite.

This is not to mention the dated and, by today’s standards, somewhat awkward social attitudes. But this is hardly surprising. A look back on today’s so-called progressive, all-inclusive Ireland in 30 years time would, in all probability, reveal the same somewhat embarrassing attitudes.

Such is the nature of social change and most people are mature enough to factor that in to any look back programming. However, the producers of Housewife of the Year weren’t having any of that whimsical down memory lane reminiscing.

Barely had the opening credits opened and we were straight in to a deep dive of social tyranny Irish style. Using archival footage from the contest, it must have been a bit like shooting fish in a barrel for the programme makers in splicing together pictures of otherwise happy and seemingly contented Irish housewives with darker images of priests, mother and baby homes etc.

We are all aware that liberals view Ireland from the 1930s to the 1950s as an unrelentingly dark and oppressive period for Irish people. But here, you had something decidedly odd – pitching the idea that the 1980s and 1990s may really have been just as bad. The subliminal message appeared to be that those smiling housewives just didn’t realise how miserable and oppressed they were after all.

Say what you like about Ireland in the 1980’s but the thing is that simply buying an evening newspaper gave you the option of picking any number of places to rent. Mind you, we’re talking about budget accommodation such as bedsitters but the point is people still had options apart from the box room upstairs in their parents’ house.

Likewise, this was still a time when it was possible for a couple to buy a house with only one of the spouses working. If that was misery then spare a thought for future programme makers in 2055 tasked with doing a look back on the lives of Irish people in today’s so-called progressive, all-inclusive Ireland.

The view that Ireland was one of the most miserable and repressed places in all of 20th century Europe is now something approaching a doctrinal fact for liberals. Indeed, a programme like Housewife of the Year uses this very much as its starting point.  

But how tested is this assertion? No one is arguing that Ireland in the 1980s (or earlier) wasn’t poor and wasn’t at times overly judgmental and mean. But compared to other European countries in the 20th century, is it really historically accurate to paint Ireland as an outlier for misery and repression?

Irish liberals usually conveniently forget that mother and baby homes were also a feature of Britain throughout much of the 20th century as they were in other European countries. However, for some strange reason, people in these countries don’t seem to have the same fixation with the past that afflicts Irish liberals.

Even as late as the 1980’s, while Irish women were – according to the programme makers - living under the yoke of Catholic oppression, people across Eastern Europe were still living under the far more menacing presence of the Stasi or whatever the local communist regime’s secret police were called.

The simple fact is that if you want to talk about misery or oppression in 20th century Europe, then a constitutional democracy like Ireland probably isn’t its best example especially when compared to what a lot of other Europeans were putting up with at the time.   

As such, no one objects to the broadcast of a lop-sided programme like Housewife of the Year. Any broadcaster, particularly one that regards itself as a public service broadcaster, should be free to broadcast material even when it appears to have a distorted view of the past.

However, it’s when you ask how likely it is that publicly funded RTÉ would be involved in commissioning a similar programme with an entirely contrary view that you realise the extent of the same media organisation’s problem with bias.

At the recent Joint Oireachtas Media Committee, when Senator Ronan Mullan pressed RTÉ top brass about the issue of bias, he was given the usual corporate run-around speak about how RTÉ strives to reflect all views and opinions in a fair and impartial manner.

But the problem for RTÉ now is that a lot of people believe that the ideological beliefs underpinning Housewife of the Year reflect the worldview of the RTÉ organisation and those who work there. This worldview is broadly shared with Ireland’s NGO complex and in line with political groupings such as the Labour Party and the Social Democrats.

That’s what now makes RTÉ’s claim to be a public service broadcaster less credible. When the public stop viewing a media organisation as a fair and impartial body, removed from the ideological beliefs of partisan lobby groups and political parties, then it forfeits the right to be called a public service broadcaster.

Of course, when that happens it also begs the more obvious question as to why TV licence payers are required to fund such an organisation or why the Irish tax payer is now funding a €725m bailout of the same media organisation.

Senator Ronan Mullan asked a question about bias and all the signs are that RTÉ answered that question with the broadcast of Housewife of the Year.

*Housewife of the Year is available to view here on the RTÉ player