At the start of the first episode of Seven Ages, Sean O Mordha's epic television history of the State, we hear, over images of Michael Collins taking possession of Dublin Castle, the voice of the writer Frank O'Connor. "I wondered," he is saying, "if it really meant that it was all over." And even if we did not know that the bloodshed was merely entering a new phase of civil war, we could guess from his tone of voice that everything was far from over. The handover of power was not an ending but a beginning, the start of new struggles and new uncertainties, the opening sentence of a story that is still unfolding. The remarkable thing is that it has taken Irish television so long to try to tell it.
The one thing that makes it seem less remarkable, however, is the trepidation of one of Ireland's most distinguished documentary film-makers, Sean O Mordha, as he prepares to launch the series.
"Just look", he says only half-jokingly, "at all the gang that will be lying in wait for me. The patriots on the 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." In a country where the line between history and current affairs is thin, O Mordha's decision to create a television history of the State is in its own way a courageous act.
He might not, at first glance, seem like the obvious choice for the job. Sean O Mordha is best known for his literary documentaries, which include an Emmy-award winning biography of James Joyce and films on Samuel Beckett, W.B. Yeats, Oscar Wilde, Elizabeth Bowen and Robert Graves. But he also has an impressive track record in politics, current affairs and history. In long years with RTE before he set up his own independent production company Araby he worked as editor of Seven Days and producer of Feach, and made documentaries on historical subjects such as Charles Stewart Parnell and the Land League. But he has never tackled a project like Seven Ages. Then again, neither has anyone else. There have, of course, been successful television histories of Ireland and of Irish nationalism. The story of the State itself, however, has not been told in the medium. That was the original impulse for approaching RTE with the idea.
"The whole drive for this project", says O Mordha, "was that if you looked at all the big TV histories by Jeremy Isaacs, Robert Kee, Peter Taylor and by French and German networks, they were all triggered by the Troubles of the last 30 years. The State here was seen from the perspective of Northern Ireland. It seemed to me that we had never told our own story in our own terms, from the inside."
In this case, moreover, the inside is an extraordinarily intimate, almost domestic space. "You've only got to name certain names - Cosgrave, FitzGerald, Mulcahy, Collins, Andrews, and so on - and you've closed the gap between then and now." Because of the relatively short span of time since 1922, on the one hand, and the dynastic nature of Irish politics on the other, the story of the State is almost the story of a few families. The three living ex-taoisigh who agreed to be interviewed for the series - Liam Cosgrave, Garret FitzGerald, and Charles Haughey - are the sons or sons-in-law of men who played key roles in the early years of the State. And many other contemporary interviewees are the children of equally prominent figures, allowing O Mordha to create at times a startling weave of archive and new material, of past and present, of history and current affairs. When Liam Cosgrave follows footage of his father William, when Risteard Mulcahy acts almost as a spokesman for his dead father General Richard Mulcahy, when Maire Mac an tSaoi explains the feelings of her father Sean McEntee, the potentially distant events of the 1920s or 1930s take on a vivid immediacy.
It was precisely the possibility of doing this that gave O Mordha the visual and narrative style of Seven Ages. "The challenge for me was - could you tell a story visually and aurally to convey the look, the feel, the personality, of the State? There was no point in doing something that didn't work as television, which is to say, as a story for the eyes and ears. It had to be for the viewer what it was for those who created the State - a shared experience of Ireland. I had to be able to create something that would be, of course, no more than a contribution to that task, but no less than a contribution either." What he most wanted to reflect in his intercutting of politicians, revolutionaries, artists, historians and economists with vivid archive footage was the sheer newness of the State and the fearful task that a relatively small number of young people had in trying to construct it. We are used, he says, to thinking of Ireland as an ancient entity, which, in some respects it is. But the institutional Ireland, the whole apparatus of government that was constructed after 1922, was an invention that had to be imposed on top of this very old culture.
"The period of the State is just one modern lifetime, but the country is as old as Newgrange. The problem for those who took part in the revolution was how to create a modern democratic state in a very old country."
So it was crucial to give viewers a sense of just how close, in historical terms, the current post-modern Irish society is to its own founding acts. The method he decided on was "to weave together the living and the dead". Instead of the usual device of having an unseen narrator tell the viewer what the real story is, Seven Ages is a continually shifting montage of perspectives. There is no crude division between archive footage of historical figures talking directly about events they were involved in and new interviews.
Nor is there any attempt to smooth over the bitter divisions that shaped the State. Instead of creating an atmosphere of tranquil recollection, O Mordha feeds the viewer with the dissonant memories and opposed viewpoints of people who were, in many cases, willing to kill and die for one or other vision of what the State should be.
The sense of a place evolving through conflict is preserved, giving the series a hard edge that is often lacking in historical documentaries.
To get that sense of an intimate, firsthand story, he had to persuade key figures such as the normally camera-shy Liam Cosgrave and the embattled Charles Haughey to record extended interviews. Just three people refused his requests for interviews, and he does not wish to say who they were. But the ones that got away seem less significant than the big fish he managed to land.
The interview with Liam Cosgrave he regards as "historically the most significant", partly because Cosgrave's memories stretch all the way back to key events of the 1920s like the murder of Kevin O'Higgins and partly because there is no other such interview in existence. Others also promise a great deal, though he is, understandably, keeping the revelations to himself for now. The former president Patrick Hillary is "extraordinarily expansive" about controversial events of the 1970s and 1980s. As for Haughey, he has given, says O Mordha, "an extended, carefully considered and valuable interview about his life and times, how he saw the State develop and his own part in it". There are also extensive interviews with Mary Robinson, Michael D. Higgins and Desmond O'Malley.
What did he himself learn from the process of making the films? "I didn't fully realise how poor the beginning of the State was in terms of the real economic impact of partition and the social and economic deprivation that it entailed. I mean, you're talking about the first government having to go to the Bank of Ireland to get a loan to enable it to run the State. And from that you get two themes that echo through the series. One is the struggle for survival, the backs-to-the-wall resilience, the real patriotism that these people showed in keeping the show on the road. And the other is that the price we paid for independence was huge, in terms of poor living and emigration for too many people for too many decades."
Now that the price paid for independence has begun to produce returns, Seven Ages seems especially timely. Many of the passions that fuelled the foundation of the State are now all but spent.
Tribunals may be revealing the extent to which the shine has gone off the ideals of politics and public service that animated the early leaders. Much of what makes up the contemporary Republic - urban, English-speaking, globalised, increasingly secular - would be, to them, a fierce disappointment. But the very fact that the State itself is taken for granted is the mark of an achievement that was by no means inevitable. As Seven Ages reminds us, the State has grown from a bloody birth and a painful adolescence to what Sean O Mordha calls "maturity, if not quite wisdom".
Seven Ages, The Story of the Irish State, begins on RTE 1 on Monday at 9.30 p.m.