The Kennedys of Castleross were a small part of my childhood. It was a radio soap that went out around lunchtime on RTE in Ireland.
I could never get my head around it. As often as the characters were explained I forgot. The same thing happened many years later when my cousin used to drive me down to Essex to stay with her parents on Friday evenings. It was The Archers but I was too late an adopter and too infrequent a listener to get the plot. What I really enjoyed as a child was Irish television. RTE didn’t have enough viewers or money to make many programmes and on principle there was a reluctance to buy from the BBC. So I had an American diet, not of hamburgers, but of Green Acres, Mr Ed, The Lucy Show, The Man From UNCLE, Get Smart, Bewitched, The Dick van Dyke Show and Sergeant Bilko.
The only homemade programmes I remember were What’s My Line (an Irish version of the BBC show) and The Late, Late Show presented by national treasure, Gay Byrne. The latter is the world’s second longest -running TV talk show, if Wikipedia is to be believed.
This is a nostalgic vignette of a small slice of life in the Republic of Ireland in the 1950s and 60s. The reality is that there was a largely rural economy, the Catholic Church played a disproportionate role in shaping opinions and policy and politicians were still re-fighting the civil war after the creation of The Irish Free State in 1922. Many rural houses were without water and relied on a village pump from which to fill buckets; smaller roads did not have tarmac; holidays abroad were rare and the most likely destination a pilgrimage to Lourdes. While Lee Kuan Yew was transforming Singapore, Ireland was being stifled by de Valera.