It feels like 100 years since Ireland embarked on its decade of centenaries. Ireland 100: An Old Song Resung (RTÉ One, Monday, 9.30pm), which marks the anniversary of the foundation of the State, is a rousing full stop to the orgy of navel-gazing – though not a perfect one.
The near-two hour film, filmed at the RDS in Dublin in early October, is a celebration of Irish music – albeit a very specific sort that tends to feature fiddles, unplugged guitar and earnest singing accompanied by eyes clamped tightly shut. Suffice to say nobody here is covering the Sultans of Ping, B*witched or Mark McCabe.
Dermot Kennedy, Damien Dempsey, Denise Chaila and Tolü Makay are among the performers giving a good account of themselves. Chaila, the Limerick-raised daughter of Zambian parents, delivers a powerful spoken word interpolation of the Michael Considine folk ballad Spancil Hill, which includes a rumination on identity and who gets to call themselves Irish.
Elsewhere, though, Ireland 100 is sometimes too Dublin-centric. Damien Dempsey performs Monto (Take Her Up To Monto), about the capital’s 19th century red-light district – which makes as much sense as singing the Boys of Fairhill or Slievenamon.
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RTÉ is to be congratulated for an ambitious project that tries to reflect the successes but also the failures of the State. London–Irish choir leader Nora Mulready talks about her mother’s experience of the mother and baby homes and her grandmother and mother’s exile from Ireland.
The tone is sometimes off, however, for example in the contribution from activist Eamonn McCann. While he correctly identifies Bloody Sunday as a schism in 20th-century Irish history, he rounds on, of all people, then minister for justice Desmond O’Malley and his firm response to the burning down of the British embassy in Dublin following the killings by the British forces in Derry.
Describing the burning of the embassy – “the Irish house of the Queen of England” – as “a rowdier act of remembrance”, McCann says that such violence “struck fear into the governing elite in the South”. It’s the sort of thing an edgy 16-year-old might write on social media. What, moreover, did he expect O’Malley to do? Stand back and let the mob have their way?
In general the concert strikes the correct balance between celebration and commemoration. Diarmaid Ferriter – a historian not previously seen on Irish airwaves – talks about the early challenges facing Ireland. He returns to outline the difficulties that followed the second World War, when the optimism sweeping western Europe passed Ireland by.
There are some omissions, though. There is no reference to the transformative power of EU membership or the significance of the Belfast Agreement. Granted, a 105-minute musical celebration of the Irish State isn’t going to have room for everything. Still, these landmarks merited mention.
The best moment is also the most subversive. Amid the wall-to-wall acoustic and traditional music, a performance by punk band The Scratch rattles the rafters. It is angry, guttural and anarchic – one of the few times Ireland 100′s po-faced edifice wobbles and the messy complexity of the country in which we live comes spilling through.
