If the notoriously mediashy documentary filmmaker, Sean O Mordha, is the Samuel Beckett of his genre, his latest television series, Seven Ages - The Story of the Irish State, is something approaching his Waiting for Godot.
The seven-part series - charting the birth, growth and development of the 26-county State - was a massive undertaking by O Mordha, who, to date, has received international acclaim for his films on Irish writing and writers.
Through the documentary medium he mastered at RTE while in his early 20s, he has illuminated the lives and work of James Joyce, John McGahern, Elizabeth Bowen and, most notably, Beckett. Now the country that helped produce them all has come under his perceptive gaze, as he holds a wider mirror up to the faces of Irish people.
The third programme begins on Monday, and so far critics have been unanimous in their praise. His objective portrayal of events from 1921 and his fluid style have been applauded. Commentators, including eyewitnesses, historians and former taoisigh, tell their story, unhindered by either a narrator or presenter.
"This is a very precious thing to him," one RTE source said, adding that the Emmy award-winning O Mordha had not furnished as much as a CV to its publicity department. "This is his magnum opus - he wanted the series to speak for itself."
Admirable as this is, his professional modesty has derailed the RTE publicity train. It was anxious to have O Mordha widely interviewed to publicise the series and, more importantly, to confront the inevitable debate that will arise from its content.
Talking to Fintan O'Toole in a rare interview last month, O Mordha alluded to the deep interest the series would provoke: "Just look at all the gang that will be lying in wait for me," he said. "The patriots on one hand, who won't be happy with anything that isn't pure hagiography. And on the other hand, all the people who aren't in it and think they should be."
If there is any fallout, O Mordha would rather just observe it from his home in Waterloo Road, Dublin, than attempt to justify his methods. Few other interviews were granted and O Mordha refused even to supply a publicity photograph of himself to RTE.
The journalist Eoghan Harris, who worked with O Mordha in RTE from the early 1960s on, has called him the Stanley Matthews of the documentary world. "He is totally brilliant and totally modest," Harris said. "He has an almost priest-like devotion to his craft. Like someone who has taken religious vows, he believes in the service of his art."
Michael Ross, editor of The Sunday Times Culture section, has written that O Mordha deserves an annual day of celebration for his body of work, which includes pieces about the making of the Land League and powerful profiles of Sean O Riada and Sean O Riordain.
"Over the past 20 years he has single-handedly amassed a very significant body of work about Irish culture and the nation . . . he respects the viewer, his films are supremely well crafted - he is just extraordinarily good at what he does," he said.
The similarity between O Mordha and Beckett most often commented on is the shared unwillingness to discuss themselves or their work. Parallels are also drawn to their monastic approach and the deep respect held for the power of their respective media. An intensely private man, it is difficult to define O Mordha in any other terms than his work. While friends say he is "serious but not solemn" it is rare that he is not either discussing or musing over some project. His wife, Kitty Mullany, is a close collaborator and was an associate producer on Seven Ages.
"To be honest, his life outside his work is not something that strikes you as important," one acquaintance said.
O Mordha was born in Dublin in 1943 and educated at Colaiste Mhuire and University College Dublin, where he read Celtic studies and modern history. His father was a bookish, scholarly man who instilled in his family a great love of the Irish language, a theme that weaves itself through O Mordha's work. His mother died shortly before the first part of Seven Ages was aired.
When he began training as a producer in RTE, he and the other four participants on the course insisted on the visually stimulating location of the National Gallery, where they set about learning their craft. During the 1960s and the 1970s he edited the Irish-language magazine, Innti, which gave a forum to budding Irish writers.
His first major programme was Roger Casement Remembered, in 1969, in which Joseph Zerhusen (89), Casement's interpreter in Germany, was interviewed. From an early age O Mordha enjoyed the company of older men, fascinated as he was by their memories of the past.
In the same year, he produced Stone Mad, a vivid portrait of the sculptor Seamus Murphy. In 1973, he followed this with Micheal, an Irish-language interview with Micheal Mac Liammoir by Sean Mac Reamoinn.
In the mid-1970s, O Mordha moved into the realm of current affairs, proving himself an able editor on hard-hitting current affairs programmes, Seven Days and Feach. In 1981, The Blue Note, a profile of Sean O Riada, marked his first big foray into the arts. Is There One Who Under- stands Me?, his 1982 documentary on James Joyce, won the film-maker an Emmy.
Yeats, Parnell and Wilde were all examined by O Mordha but his two Beckett profiles, Silence to Silence, in 1984, and As The Story Was Told, in 1995, are perhaps his biggest achievement. In the past decade he left RTE to set up his own company, Araby Productions, and his programmes have been invested in by both the State broadcaster and the BBC. There have been some lean years, but his relationship with both broadcasters has remained relatively good.
According to Harris, O Mordha is the closest thing to a pluralist he knows. "You can see it in the current series. . .he would go for Fianna Fail or Fine Gael, depending on whether at different times they had stood by and upheld the values of the Free State," he said.
"He feels strongly about the State and there are no condemnations but there are some lost reputations restored. It is all just laid out in front of the viewer, with no political correctness."
Commentators believe he is a documentary-maker in the tradition of John Grierson, with his images chosen carefully in order to convey a message far beyond the visual content.
His oeuvre warrants the kind of accolades that would no doubt be rejected by the self-effacing O Mordha. Integrity, not egocentricity, is his middle name. Still, the very least that can be said about Sean O Mordha is that like others in his new series he has done the State some service. Unlike others, he would never say so himself.
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