Face the music – A new, deeply personal documentary on the life of Seán Ó Riada

The justification for a new documentary about Seán Ó Riada was the 50th anniversary of his death in October.

But it's apt that "Seán Ó Riada – Mo Sheanathair" should get its TV premiere at Christmas (TG4 St Stephen's Day, 9.20pm) because, as the title suggests, the film is an unusually personal one, in which the composer's granddaughter, Doreann Ní Ghlacáin, recalls his life with the help of other family members.

In the best seasonal tradition, this also involves confronting mixed emotions about the departed, including what Ní Ghlacáin admits is a certain anger about how her grandfather died.

That in turn brings up another subject inextricably connected with Christmas.

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Thus the documentary’s climactic question is whether Ó Riada, a 40-year-old man with seven young children as well as a stellar career, knowingly drank himself into an early grave.

It falls to his son and musical heir Peadar to defend him against the charge. In a moving and honest conversation with Ní Ghlacáin, he recalls that her grandfather had a “very weak” liver, “banjaxed” by the end, although it was a heart attack that officially killed him.

His problems weren’t all about about drink, Peadar adds. Ó Riada was also forbidden to eat anything with sugar in it. “Desserts were a big no-no” too, but he had no problem avoiding those. In the Irish music world of the time, however, alcohol was less easy to escape.

Ó Riada agrees his father was an addict, yet demurs from suggestions that he was a heavy drinker. He tells his niece at one point: “I never saw him blind drunk”. And at another: “Like, I never saw him drinking at home, if that’s what you’re asking.”

The subject of the composer’s last Christmas (1970) is raised, via a doctor’s order that he should abstain from spirits at all cost. But Peadar points to another crisis that had just broken then: the breast cancer that would end the life of Ruth Ó Riada (Seán’s wife and Peadar’s mother) a few years later.

Ó Riada Snr had been suddenly forced to consider the prospect of raising seven children alone. It was the pressures of life in general, rather than just alcohol, that killed him, Peadar thinks. “Too much fell far too heavily on him and he had no way out, at least none that he could see.”

Despite the documentary’s title, Ruth Ó Riada also features prominently throughout. Indeed, aside from the interview with Peadar, the film is something of a feminist review of the composer’s life and relationships, with Ní Ghlacáin’s mother Sorcha also contributing.

It traces the couple's early days in Cork and Dublin, then an experiment in which they lived separately for a while in London and Paris. The documentary reverses the usual narrative in which Ruth followed Seán to France and brought him home.

In fact, he went from London to Paris (where she was working in an antiques shop) to join her, much to the suspicion of her family, who thought she was doing better without him.

Then they returned to Ireland. And abandoning his earlier interest in the European avant-garde, the former John Reidy reinvented himself as Ó Riada to embark on his defining mission, elevating Irish traditional music from humble origins via such work as Mise Éire (1959). He went on to found Ceoltóirí Chulainn, which played traditional airs in concert halls, and was a key influence on the 1960s folk revival.

The semi-official verdict on Ó Riada's career was given after his death by this newspaper's long-time music critic, Charles Acton, also quoted in the documentary: "He had it in him to be our first great composer, our Grieg or our Sibelius. That cannot now be. Perhaps the medium of his genius was life and not works, for he lived his whole life as an imaginative creative process. He begat ideas from projects as a fire begets sparks. Some of them kindled other people. Some of them flew up into the air and may yet return. Some few of them merged with his own flame and left us enduring works."

But Seán Ó Riada – Mo Sheanathair is mostly about a family’s coming to terms with the legacy of a famous father and grandfather who died too young. Ní Ghlacáin hears the last, philosophical word on the subject from her Uncle Peadar, who as a child was left in a nursing home for a time while his young parents tried to find themselves abroad.

“I wouldn’t be angry with him at all. A person lives their life as best they can,” he concludes. “So that’s it. You have to make up your own mind now. I can’t tell you what to think.”