Wherever you go in Ireland this year, it seems you can't escape the bicentennial of the 1798 rebellion. Television has already given us Louis Marcus's 1798 Agus O Shin for TnaG and Brian Keenan's Patriot's Fate for BBC Northern Ireland. But Rebellion, the three-part documentary series starting on RTE 1 next week, is on a considerably larger scale and promises to be the definitive television offering on the subject for some time to come. It's also the biggest historical series produced by RTE in many years, representing a significant investment by the national broadcaster and probably one of its biggest productions in 1998.
Rebellion's executive producer, Kevin Dawson, believes the series is the centrepiece of the bicentennial commemorations. "Although that doesn't mean any disrespect towards the many smaller events which are happening around the country."
For Dawson, producing the series was a personal education. "A year ago, I hadn't touched or thought about the subject since I did my Inter Cert. But what strikes one immediately is that 1798 is big - 20-30,000 people were killed in the space of a few weeks, so it's on a different scale from events like 1848. The production challenge for us lay in compressing all this into three hours of television."
The opening programme, An Age Of Revolutions, sets the international context from which the rebellion sprang, in particular the influence of the American and French Revolutions. "Those revolutions burst open the stagnant social structures in Ireland," says Dawson, citing Prof Tom Bartlett's description of the French Revolution as "the most important event in European history, certainly since Martin Luther and arguably since the birth of Christ."
While the first programme brings us through to the brink of rebellion, the second takes us as far as the defeat at New Ross, an event to which Dawson ascribes greater importance than the more famous reverse at Vinegar Hill. These tumultuous, violent events are vividly recreated, using 3-D graphics in a way that hasn't been seen before in an Irish production. The computer simulations, blended with present-day footage of battle locations such as New Ross, Antrim town and Vinegar Hill, are remarkably effective in conveying a sense of the ebb and flow of the fighting. "The challenge was to find ways to bring the story to life, and using these techniques allowed us to give a better idea of what happened, and to offer added visual value."
The programme-makers trawled archives for documents and other material, talked to academics and local historians, and filmed reconstructions of American Revolution battles in the US last year. These different strands are impressively woven together around Cathal O'Shannon's central narration. "One has to be conscious of the fact that people are aware of and accustomed to Hollywood production values," says Dawson of the programme's style, which compares very favourably in this writer's eyes with the rather clunky re-enactments of some other recent historical documentaries such as Ballyseedy.
He stresses that Rebellion doesn't just tell the stories of the main protagonists and the key military conflicts. "It's also very much about the many ordinary people who were affected by these events."
The third programme looks at the crushing of the rebellion, with the French incursion in Co Mayo almost as a coda, and at the repercussions of the conflict. "There clearly are relevant parallels with the present day," says Dawson: "1798 sees the appearance for the first time of modern Irish republicanism, and of militant loyalism. The Act of Union grew directly out of these events, as did the sectarianism of the 19th century. It suited both Catholic nationalism and Protestant loyalism in the 19th century to describe this as a Catholic, priest-led event, but the truth is much more complex."
"It's a huge, rich, epic, tragic story, and once people tune in, I have no doubt they'll be drawn into it. My hope is that they will come away from this series with a better sense of why these events are so important."
Rebellion begins next Wednesday at 9.30 p.m. on RTE 1