Nostalgia is a complicated subject in an Irish context given that, for more or less the entirety of the 20th century, the country was trapped in an endless cycle of spiritual repression and poverty. It's hard to romanticise pauperised theocracy. So credit must go to the returning documentary series The Way We Were (RTÉ One, Monday, 9.35pm) as it focuses on sex and romance. Despite the wall-to-wall misery, the episode strikes a tone of sweetly-spun optimism, without ever denying the purgatorial experience of growing up in a closed-off society at the edge of Europe.
The format is talking heads mixed with archive footage. And so veteran presenter Mike Murphy expresses his horror at the practice of “Churching”, whereby a new mother was paraded before a priest, so that the cleric could absolve her of the “sin” of becoming pregnant. “You had got into a sinful state to give birth to a child.”
Here and elsewhere the picture is grim. Women were considered “property” of their husband until the law was changed in the early 1980s while vows of “obedience”, on the part of the woman, were standard in marriage. Contraception was outlawed until the 1970s, and even after that, available only to married couples and from a pharmacist. Good luck being gay, in a failed relationship or having a child out of wedlock.
Change came slow and accompanied by widespread societal convulsions. Singer Mary Coughlan recalls the “spitting and name-calling” she endured campaigning for divorce 1986.
Of course the Church was not imposed on Ireland from without and reflected the reactionary forces that were bound up in the collective psyche. A symbol of these attitudes was agony aunt Angela McNamara, who characterised extra-marital sex as “the greatest sickness in our society at the present time”.
However, in even the most emotionally closed-off environment, a little brightness gets through the cracks. And the mood lightens as the trials of growing up are wryly discussed by the assembled celebrities and historians.
“I think he used the word ‘willies’, by which point my brother and I were cracking up laughing,” recollects comedian Ardal O’Hanlon of the time his father attempted to teach him the facts of life.
The terrible lack of self esteem from which many Irish people suffered is meanwhile unpacked by Joe Duffy. “All I remember was embarrassment and being crippled by shyness,” he says of his early dating life.
These moments of wit and humanity are crucial. Because elsewhere there is so much bleakness. Ireland in the 20th century was, in many cases, a history of lives not lived, of horizons plunged into darkness, of futures snuffed out.
“You’d go to the lounge and find half a dozen men … and [you would] feel the melancholy. A weight of sadness,” says writer Michael Harding. “There was a gay life in them that [they] had never been allowed express. They lived false lives, many of them ‘til death.” Forget Reeling in the Years. This is Reeling in the Tears – and in that unflinchingness lies its power.
