RTÉ Player is perhaps the most notorious software ever created in Ireland. There are more ads than you'll find plastered to the exterior of a Formula One car. And on a bad day this glitchy abomination can be a one-way ticket to TV purgatory. As you will know if you've ever had the pleasure of logging in for a soccer match or big GAA final, only to be greeted by pixellated figures straight from Match Day on the ZX Spectrum.
Away from the baying crowd, however, the Player has been quietly distinguishing itself with original content such as the new three-part series Our Land (RTÉ Player, from Tuesday). A dreamy snapshot of multicultural Ireland, it doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know already (news just in: Ireland is more diverse than it used to be). But it captures the sense of a country caught up in a moment of historic change, of a traditionally closed-off place where horizons are suddenly broadening.
We meet Holly Pereira, an Irish-Singaporean illustrator and painter. When she was an infant, she says, her white Irish mother would be asked if she was “the Chinese baby’s nanny”. In her teens, people continued to gawp. “Why are you calling yourself Irish and you have brown skin?,” they would say . “You can’t do those things.”
'Classicism is a really big issue in Ireland, as someone who grew up in Blanch'
Our Land also introduces Dagogo Hart, a poet originally from Nigeria who moved to Tralee as a teenager. With a smile he recalls the culture shock. “You don’t get a lot of continental, international food,” he says. “Now mashed potato is one of my favourite things.”
The intersection between race and class is explored, too, by South African-born director Bobby Zithelo, who covered adjacent territory with 2020 short film, This Land and who has directed videos for Tolu Makay and Loah.
Coming of age in Blanchardstown, West Dublin, rapper JyellowL recalls the Nigerian community having a lot in common with working class white people. Going out into the world, it was only when he bumped up against the betters-off in society that he felt he was colliding with an immovable object.
“Classicism,” he says, “is a really big issue in Ireland, as someone who grew up in Blanch.”
Our Land makes you want to throw open the shutters and engage with the rapidly-transforming country outside your front door
Our Land is a series of snapshots rather than a definitive statement about what it is to be Irish in 2022. And it doesn’t always the connect the dots. Speaking about her identity, Irish Times journalist Sorcha Pollak, for instance, says that “I have a strong Irish heritage that is very important to me. I feel strongly connected to my Czech roots”.
What, though, are those roots? Are her parents Czech? Her grandparents? This information is doubtless a mere Google search away – but the producers should have gone further in filling in the blanks.
These are quibbles, however. Three bite-sized episodes – each clocking in at about 20 minutes – sketch an emotive and deeply humane picture of modern Irishness in all its hues. With the pandemic seemingly (hopefully) at an end, it makes you want to throw open the shutters and engage with the rapidly-transforming country outside your front door.
Our Land is streaming now on the RTÉ Player
