`At one level, we are living in a period of extraordinary cultural vitality in this country," says Prof Joe Lee in Treo?, a new series about Irish culture in the modern world, starting next week. "At the same time, at a mass cultural level you could argue that we're being sucked more and more into mass Anglo culture . . . we are groping towards a redefinition of ourselves."
It is this question of redefinition which lies at the heart of the six-part bilingual series, in which historians, journalists and artists talk from different perspectives on language, music and the media in 1990s Ireland. Those interviewed range from poet Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill to historian Gearoid O Tuathaigh, from film-maker Bob Quinn to Orange spokesman George Patton.
"In the brief we were given by RTE, the Irish language had an integral role," says Dairena Ni Chinneide, whose independent company, Smerbhic Teo, produced Treo? (meaning "direction" or "intersection"). "I'm not sure that these themes have been dealt with in this way before. When you film about 45 interviews, you'll find that there's a very broad scope to the subjects discussed. But I think that you'll find a thesis and antithesis in there somewhere. In the beginning, I had this notion that there's now a lot more positivity around about Irish music and Irish culture than there used to be, and I wanted to ask what that really meant, how real it was." There's certainly a diversity of views on offer in Treo? At the risk of simplifying the complexities of the different positions, there seems to be a basic division between those who see recent social and cultural changes as broadly positive and liberating, and those who excoriate what Michael D. Higgins describes as "the philistinism at the heart of this Celtic Tiger".
The two-year process of making the series was extremely laborious, says Ni Chinneide. "I wanted the series to stir things up, but I didn't want an authorial voice there, because I thought that would come across as stagnant, so it took a lot of work to draw out the various threads. Somebody described it as a cerebral series, because you're bombarded with ideas, but that could be seen as very heavy-handed, so we wanted to ensure that there was a strong visual element to the programmes. Many of the questions we ask simply raise more questions than answers, but that's all right."
Treo? begins on RTE 1, Tuesday, 7.30 p.m.
