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The Irish Sun
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Irish Sun
‘Heartbreaking to watch' – RTE viewers left stunned by ‘powerful' Housewife of the Year documentary
RTE viewers were left stunned after watching the "powerful" and "heartbreaking" Housewife of the Year documentary. The documentary, directed by award-winning filmmaker Ciaran Cassidy, had its Irish TV premiere on 2 Housewife of the Year had its Irish TV premiere on RTE One last night Credit: Instagram 2 The documentary sparked a strong reaction from RTE viewers Credit: Instagram It looked back at the "shocking" Housewife of the Year competition, which ran from 1968 to 1995. The annual contest saw women from across the country compete for the title live on national television. The competition celebrated "cookery, nurturing, and basic household management skills" - but what was shown on screens didn't always reflect the reality of life for Irish women at the time. The read more on RTE Former contestants told the story of a resilient generation of women and how they changed a country. Many recalled their direct experiences of marriage bars, lack of contraception, Magdalene laundries, financial vulnerability, boredom and shame, all while being contestants in the competition. From 1982 onwards, the competition aired on RTE and featured not just the contest itself but also footage of the women at home. The documentary has sparked a strong reaction from RTE viewers as many took to READ MORE ON THE IRISH SUN Sylvia said: "It's sad and frustrating, upsetting, limiting, suppressive for a generation who had to stay at home and look after the family." Keith wrote: "What an awful country we lived in back then, shocking." 'That's when panic set in' - Watch Camogie ace & gold medallist's scary cliff moment on Death Road in RTE's Uncharted Marc commented: "Watching Housewife of the Year. Incredibly well put together Irish documentary. Is it shocking? I'd say infuriating." 'INCREDIBLE WOMEN' Grace said: "Housewife of the Year was a masterpiece of contextualisation - such a clever way to present Ireland of the time. "These diverse women's stories a microcosm of Irish society. So glad they got the opportunity to share their lived experiences since." Joanne wrote: "Had the privilege of seeing this at the Toronto Irish Film Festival this winter. "Such a powerful, sobering, film. More power to these incredible women. To all women." Another added: "Heartbreaking to watch these stories being told. What some of these women have been put through."
Irish Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Housewife of the Year review: A reminder that Ireland of the 1970s and 80s was no country for women of any age
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.' READ MORE 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 also be streamed on Apple TV+
Irish Independent
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Housewife of the Year review: Award-winning documentary unearths the sad stories behind an Irish TV relic
Today at 13:00 The period between feature documentaries showing at festivals and cinemas, then turning up in our living rooms has shortened significantly in recent years. Ciaran Cassidy's excellent Housewife of the Year (RTÉ1, Monday, June 2) did the festival circuit last year, winning a prize at Galway Film Fleadh, and enjoying a limited run in cinemas. And yet television, where it will reach a much larger audience, feels like its natural home. After all, television was the home of the bizarre spectacle that was the Housewife of the Year competition. It started in 1967, was televised live by RTÉ from 1982 and lasted – astonishingly – until 1995. From the outset, it was a cringe-inducing anachronism. The contestants were judged on qualities including sense of humour, budgeting skills, civic-mindedness and their ability to prepare 'a simple meal' for the hubby coming home from a hard day's work. They were also encouraged, Rose of Tralee-style, to do a party piece. 'It's very good to be good-looking, but that's no excuse for bad cooking,' ran one self-penned poem. Presiding over the whole thing was host Gay Byrne. Clips from the original broadcasts, skilfully assembled by editor Cara Holmes, remind us that Byrne – who always received an inordinate amount of credit for supposedly dragging Ireland into the light of modernity when it was others, mainly women, who were doing the real heavy lifting – could be gratingly patronising. 'Are you a women's libber?' he asks one woman, as the audience whoop with laughter and clap like performing seals. The whole thing was an embarrassment ripe for mockery, and mock it plenty of people did. Cassidy uses the Housewife of the Year competition, absurd as it was, as a jumping off point for a look at how generations of women were subjugated by the State and the church A lesser documentary might have gone down the point-and-snigger route: 'Look at this! Can you believe how backward Ireland was in those days?' Instead, Cassidy uses the Housewife of the Year competition, absurd as it was, as a jumping off point for a look at how generations of women were subjugated by the State and the church – which were basically one and the same entity – sometimes with the collusion of their husbands and parents. In its own unwitting way, the competition was a small brick in the wall of sexism and misogyny that kept Irish women where the patriarchy thought they belonged: in the kitchen and the maternity ward. ADVERTISEMENT Learn more There's no narration, no learned talking heads. Just the faces and voices of some of the women who entered it and, in some cases, won. We see them first as they were in those old clips, then as they are now – standing on a bare stage, telling their personal stories of sadness and cruelty from a time when contraception and divorce were outlawed, and women had to give up work as soon as they married (teachers were an exception). One was married at 20. At 31, she had 13 children, including four sets of twins. 'I didn't know which end of me was up,' she says. Her husband drank their money. The more kids she had, the more he retreated to the pub. She used to take a pot to a food centre to have it filled with stew. On the bus home, everyone could smell the stew – the smell of embarrassment. She entered the competition for the prize – £300 in cash and a gas cooker – and won. Another, having taken some photos of herself and her two friends on an innocent rowing boat trip with some boys when she was 16, left the film in the pharmacy for developing. The pharmacist brought the pictures to the local priest, who showed them to her parents and said: 'You need to do something about this one.' They took his advice and deposited her with the Magdalene Sisters, then left without saying goodbye. Vivid and moving as their recollections are, there's a remarkable lack of bitterness here There were stories here of a woman abandoned by her husband, of one who made contact with the mother who'd given her up for adoption, only to be told by her half-sisters, 'You weren't wanted then and you're not wanted now,' and of one who gave up a nursing career in London to marry into a life of domestic drudgery. 'I was doing things that didn't need doing at all, just to occupy my mind,' she says. Vivid and moving as their recollections are, there's a remarkable lack of bitterness here. The Housewife of the Year show may have been a symbol of a repressive society, but some of them look back on it with a certain degree of affection.
New York Times
07-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Housewife of the Year': Contestants Look Back in Dismay
There's a temptation, when making a documentary about some obviously retrograde practice from the past, for filmmakers to treat their subject like something to gawk at. Can you believe how backward earlier generations were? Let's all point and stare and wince. 'Housewife of the Year' (in theaters), directed by Ciaran Cassidy, could very easily have gone in that direction. The film is about (and named after) a live, prime-time televised competition that took place from 1969 to 1995 in Ireland — and it's pretty much what it sounds like. Women, generally married and raising a large family, were judged on qualities ranging from sense of humor and civic-mindedness to budgeting, preparing a simple meal and, of course, keeping up their appearance. All of this, the movie briefly explains via text onscreen, can be seen as an effort to prop up the social order in a deeply religious, deeply traditionalist country where it was virtually impossible for a married woman to maintain many kinds of employment. 'The state shall endeavor to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home,' Article 41.2 of the Irish Constitution proclaims. The competition helped reinforce those values. As Irish society changed, especially with respect to women's rights and reproductive freedoms, the competition eventually turned into 'Homemaker of the Year,' open to all genders. But that's not the focus of the documentary, nor is there ponderous narration explaining to us what happened. Instead, 'Housewife of the Year' focuses on two main ways of telling its story. The first is archival footage from the competition, which reinforces how much of it focused on patronizing and even belittling the women as they participated, via the male host, Gay Byrne, interviewing them onstage. It's remarkable to watch. But woven throughout are present-day interviews with many of the participants, now much older, who see things differently than they probably did back then. They tell stories of what was really going on in the background: alcoholic or deadbeat husbands, economic catastrophes, backbreaking labor. One woman, Ena, talks about having given birth to 14 children by the time she was 31, owing largely to the ban on contraception. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
