How brilliantly cheeky of RTÉ to use the publication of the 1926 census as an excuse to soft-launch what’s essentially its own version of the BBC genealogy blockbuster Who Do You Think You Are?
In that series, celebs of fluctuating degrees of starriness delve into the family archives and discover that their great-great-grandfather was, variously, Queen Victoria’s scullery maid and/or a private in the 92nd Highlanders during the second Afghan war.
In the case of Come to Your Census (RTÉ One, Sunday) the celebs include the writer Joseph O’Connor, the radio presenter Louise Duffy and the actor Eileen Walsh, who also narrates.
First up, however, are the Raidió na Gaeltachta presenter Gormfhlaith Ní Thuairisg, the ubiquitous architect Dermot Bannon and Mick Lynch, the British trade unionist whose father’s family is from Cork city.
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As with Who Do You Think You Are?, the celebrities function as stand-ins for the viewers at home, whose families will have likewise struggled amid the Dickensian destitution of a newly independent Ireland. The approach brings a satisfyingly human touch to our understanding of the census, showing the complicated lives behind the raw facts and figures.
Derivative? Yes (and there actually was an Irish Who Do You Think You Are?, which ran on and off from 2008 to 2018). But RTÉ makes the most of its shameless pickpocketing of the BBC with an engaging cast of famous(ish) people.
Lynch, in particular, is agreeably chatty company as he returns to his father’s hometown and is disappointed to discover that the inner-city neighbourhood where the family grew up in extreme poverty was razed decades ago to make way for social housing (now itself scheduled for demolition).
Lynch’s father died when Mick was just 16. In returning to Cork, he hopes to get a sense both of his dad and of how Cork shaped him. It brings an element of humanity to what might have been a dry historical survey of 1920s Ireland. “I never really knew him as a man,” he says. “For me he is more of a myth, I suppose.”
His father was born John but known to all as Jack. He had a namesake on the other side of the Lee: the future taoiseach. In Cork, Lynch is struck by the different lives they lived. One went to London and made a new life. The other became an All-Ireland-winning hurler and footballer and then, as an encore, head of government.
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Lynch troops up to the north side and Jack Lynch’s family home in Shandon, which now bears a plaque on the wall. There wasn’t a lot of luxury here, but these Lynches had the means to stay in school. Education allowed them to escape the poverty that had forced Mick’s dad to move abroad (though his son suspects his father might also have wanted to see more of the world).
In Connemara, Ní Thuairisg becomes emotional reading the signatures of long-dead relatives. “You never think that people were young,” she says. “You think of these people as old.” She dabs away a tear, overwhelmed by the sheer accumulation of joy and sadness contained in the pages of the census.
Bannon is in Cappoquin, in Co Waterford, where his father’s family once lived, and where life in the 1920s was overshadowed, figuratively and literally, by the presence of an industrial school. He is shocked by the age of the children housed there – a reminder that, in the promised land of a free Ireland, many continued to live in hellish circumstances.
“Six, five, eight ... I thought in an industrial school they would be teenagers.”
He stands outside the now-ruined building and reads the words engraved on a wall: “Suffer little children,” they begin. He shivers, sensing ghosts all around. The building looms above, as if watching and listening. Bannon grimaces. “It has a real institutional feel to it.”
Given all the misery, there is an obvious risk of stumbling into trauma porn. But Come to Your Census offsets the historical grimness with a brisk pacing – nothing is lingered upon – and is further aided by the enthusiasm with which the celebs delve into their family history.
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Even when pottering around an industrial school, Bannon, for instance, is incapable of less than 110 per cent chipperness. Ní Thuairisg, for her part, introduces a note of optimism as she reflects on how lucky she has been to live in a community from which so many were forced to leave.
Still, there’s no getting around the fact that, for most Irish people, grinding poverty was a fact of life – until outside (overwhelmingly American) investment brought us the Ireland we live in today.
“The Free State didn’t get on initially with what they needed to do,” Mick Lynch says, gazing at Cork’s docklands and the new skyscrapers springing up in the European home of Apple.
“It took a very long time to get the country moving, to address the needs of the common people.”
He’s right. Just ask those who came before us and who grew up five to a room, in the shadow of industrial schools and with no future but the boat to England.
