If the “Lovely Girls” episode of Father Ted was a horror movie, it might have looked something like Housewife of the Year (RTÉ One, Monday, 9.30pm). Ciaran Cassidy’s documentary about the only-in-Ireland “best mammy” contest, hosted each year by Gay Byrne through the 1980s and early 1990s, depicts the event as a glorified pageant for homemakers and a sort of Handmaid’s Tale-type ritual that left women in little doubt where they stood in post-DeValera Ireland. Young, old, in-between – the film is a reminder that Ireland was no country for women of any age, and Housewife of the Year let them know it.
Cassidy gets the tone exactly right, capturing the low-wattage despair that was part of the background radiation of early 1980s Ireland. When telling the story, there was surely a temptation to serve up a Reeling in the Years type nostalgia-fest – to portray Housewife of the Year as toe-curling and harmless cultural bric-a-brac, to be filed alongside Bosco and Live at Three. The director takes a different tack by interviewing a number of women who participated in this grim jamboree and who are today largely astonished by their naivety.
The contrast between the picture they were required to present while on a podium next to “Uncle Gaybo” – as he refers to himself – and their present-day selves is striking. Ann McStay talks about having had 13 children by the age of 31 and of having to take a bus to what was, in effect, a soup kitchen to feed her family while her husband sought refuge at the bottom of a glass. “The more kids I had, the more he receded into the pub,” she says. “He was probably a bit bamboozled”.
She entered Housewife of the Year for the prize money and, emboldened by her victory, later spoke out against Ireland’s medieval contraception laws. “After I won, that gave me a bit of courage. You had to be very careful but you have to say it as it is.”
Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, Apple TV+: 10 of the best new shows to watch in May
Aidan Gillen and Ella Lily Hyland to star in new crime drama Tall Tales & Murder
Dept. Q on Netflix: A thumpingly bingable thriller fuelled by mordant wit and a world-weary detective
Stick review: Owen Wilson is full of charm in this wry, unassuming golf comedy
Just as striking is the story of Ena Howell, whose unmarried mother gave birth to her at the notorious Bessborough Mother and Baby Home in Cork; at the Housewife of the Year, her adoptive mother and her family were gathered on one side of the aisle while on the other her birth mother sat alone. Having reached out to her mother, Ena, we are told her half-siblings demanded she cut off contact. “They couldn’t accept that their perfect family wasn’t perfect any more.”
Housewife of the Year has many such stories – one woman describes being packed off to a Magdalene Laundry after a pharmacist passes on photographs of her innocently mucking about with some male friends to the parish priest. Another recalls how she became pregnant before marrying her husband and worrying this might be exposed during the contest. “It was scary. There was still a stigma to it,” she says. “I didn’t want my eldest child to have to suffer anything.”
But Cassidy also acknowledges not every mother in 1980s Ireland considered their life a patriarchal hellscape. “I loved being a housewife,” says Patricia Connolly. “It never entered my head to go out to work. I didn’t have to. Your life revolved around your husband and children.”
Gay Byrne doesn’t cover himself in glory. As in his interviews on The Late Late Show with Sinéad O’Connor, he comes across as patronising and high on his own smarm. When one contestant reveals she is pregnant, he puts a hand on her waist and cradles his head against her baby bump. There is nothing licentious about the gesture – he isn’t being a creep – but nor is he respectful of her personal space.
Documentaries about Ireland under the Church are often defined by a sense of barely contained anger. Cassidy’s film is in a different register: it radiates a deep sadness as it bears witness to generations of women for whom Ireland was a place of narrowed horizons and stifled opportunities. “It’s like a dreamworld – people accepted all these things,” says one contributor, sounding like someone stirring from a nightmare.
Housewife of the Year can be viewed on RTÉ Player
