The Riordans

The show was called The Riordans after the name of the central family, consisting of the middle-aged parents, Tom and Mary, and their oldest son, Benjy, as well as the latter's siblings Michael and Jude, who had left farming for other careers and had more adventurous personal lives. Other leading characters included the family doctor, his Protestant gentry-born wife, the (radical Vatican II-oriented) Catholic priest, the conservative Church of Ireland rector, the local pub owner, some nomadic Irish Travellers and others.

As with all soap operas, The Riordans was centred on various tensions, rivalries and relationships. Among the central ones were

• generational - conservative parents (Tom and Mary) and radical young son and heir (Benjy); Batty Brennan and his wife Minnie Brennan, as the old people in the community, against everyone else;
• mother versus son - Mary against Benjy, which some critics likened to John Millington Synge's The Playboy of the Western World;
• liberal versus conservative - radical priest Father Sheehy versus his older parishioners; conservative parents Tom and Mary against liberal children Michael and Jude; conservative Catholics Tom and Mary versus their contraception-using daughter-in-law, Maggie Riordan;
• outsider versus insider - the Riordan family, with their middle-class farming background, against orphan Maggie, wife of Benjy; members of the nomadic Irish Traveller community versus the settled farming community;
• Class - well-to-do characters like the Church of Ireland upper middle-class doctor's wife, Mrs. Howard, and the middle-class farming Riordans, against farm labourers Batty Brennan and Eamonn Maher;
• community gossip - as with most soaps, The Riordans contained a 'local gossip' character, Minnie Brennan, who, typically for such characters, proclaimed no interest in gossip at all, but nevertheless became the source of local information on the lives and loves of the community.

One additional twist to the series was that the elderly gossip, Mrs Brennan, though considerably older than all the other characters (and actors) in the series except her onscreen husband Batty Brennan (he had to be written out of the series suddenly when the actor playing him died), was played by the elderly Annie D'Alton, the real-life wife of John Cowley, Tom Riordan, the lead middle-aged character. The striking difference in ages of the couple (she was his senior by twenty years, and as Minnie Brennan was made to look even older through make-up) became a source of comment among viewers, as some noted in letters to the show that she was old enough on screen to convincingly play his mother.[6] Local actors included Peter Greene, who played a young boy always in trouble. Many other locals were cast during the many seasons.

The show underwent a number of changes in the mid-1970s, most notably moving from a half-hour to one-hour format, as well as a change in theme tune. The music originally used to introduce each episode was Seóirse Bodley's orchestral arrangement of the Irish traditional tune, "The Palatine's Daughter".[11] The decision of the actor Tom Hickey to leave the series caused some problems. His character, Benjy, was not killed off but went abroad "on the missions" (i.e., to work with the Catholic Church in Africa). A new farm labourer, played by new actor Gabriel Byrne, was introduced in 1978 and he played the love-interest for Maggie, Benjy's wife, who had remained after refusing to go to Africa with him. While the show had declined somewhat from its heyday, it still regularly battled with The Late Late Show to top the TAM ratings and there was some surprise when one episode, which unusually departed from the 1970s and focused on Tom Riordan as a young man in the 1930s at a family céilí, was critically acclaimed by the media and many older viewers, who viewed it as an accurate representation of life on an Irish farm in the 1930s and 1940s. With its considerable popularity, large cast of respected actors, high production values and its central location on the schedules of RTÉ 1, few expected the show to be axed, let alone so suddenly.

There was however considerable surprise, and a lot of criticism, when the new Director of Programming at RTÉ, Muiris MacConghail decided that the show had run its course and so axed it. Part of the justification was cost: it was one of RTÉ's most expensive shows to make. With the launch of RTÉ 2 in 1978 the station believed that it needed to produce more shows for its limited budget as a small station, and it could not do that if The Riordans took up much of the budget. Critics however suggested that RTÉ had failed to market the show internationally and that, given the size of the Irish diaspora internationally, all interested in 'home', it could have had an international market among stations in countries with large Irish audiences, with its sale recouping much of the cost involved in its making.

The public, the media and politicians all criticised the axing of one of the most popular shows on RTÉ. However, notwithstanding the outcry, and condemnation by John Cowley who argued that the cast had been badly treated, the last television episode was broadcast on RTÉ television in May 1979.

Fine Gael TD Tom Enright, during a 1980 debate in Dáil Éireann said of the decision:

"The Riordans", one of the finest programmes that I can remember seeing and was most enjoyable, was dropped from television some time ago. It touched on many important social aspects of not just rural Irish life but all aspects of Irish life. It incorporated many delicate matters and matters which people shied away from and it was an in-depth study of life in Ireland. I am certain that the cost factor had a lot to do with the removal of this programme, but it was a mistake to remove it and this is evident when we see some of the programmes that replace it on the television service.[12]

The show was resurrected for RTÉ Radio 1 as a fifteen-minute daily show where it lasted a few years. The move to radio allowed some of the older actors to retire, while departed characters, such as Benjy and Eamon, could be brought back, albeit not with the original actors but with actors who sounded like the person who played them in the television series, Jonathan Ryan as Benjy and Mick Lally as Eamon. The Riordans was later dropped from the radio schedules as part of a re-organisation of the schedules.

The series was replaced by a spin-off series Bracken, which saw Gabriel Byrne's character move from Kilkenny to Wicklow. Bracken became the second in a trilogy of agricultural soaps/dramas produced by RTÉ, the final such soap being Glenroe.

While occasional media reports have wondered whether the show should return, notably when the independent TV3 was launched and was seeking to capture the audience, there is little chance of its return, given the death of some of its leading actors, including John Cowley (Tom Riordan), Chris O'Neill (Michael Riordan), Moira Deady, (Mary Riordan), Annie D'Alton (Minnie Brennan), Tony Doyle (Fr. Sheehy), Joe Pilkington (Eamon Maher), Christopher Casson (The Rector), Jack O'Reilly (Johnny Mac), Biddy White Lennon (Maggie Riordan) and Tom Hickey, as well as the unavailability of Gabriel Byrne, now a Hollywood actor.

The final 26 episodes of The Riordans( which were cut in 2 which resulted in 52 30mins episodes) was shown From October 1980 on the various ITV regions - for the most part, in most areas, it was shown three times a week, on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays at 12:30 - most regions temporarily dropped Australian wartime drama The Sullivans, which had been aired in that timeslot in most regions, to accommodate The Riordans. In London region, the series was only screen weekly on Monday finishing on 12 October 1981. In the Tyne Tees region, The Sullivans continued to air on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 12:30, but The Riordans aired on Wednesdays only - they gradually fell behind the network as a result. It was dropped from that timeslot after a while - only to continue in the 3:45 slot on Tuesday afternoons (a brief narrated refresher course was provided) and carried on in that slot until the final episode.

The Riordans was a key development in late 20th century television drama, because, as well as giving RTÉ its first experience of how to create a long-running soap opera, its use of OBUs changed the methodology by which later soaps in both Britain and Ireland were made. It embodied the changing Ireland of its period. When it was first broadcast, the reforming Seán Lemass was Taoiseach. When it finished, his son-in-law - the controversial Charles Haughey - was months from becoming Taoiseach. The Riordans covered a period of rapid transition in Irish life, from an agrarian, protectionist Ireland of the early 1960s to membership of the European Economic Community and so a rapidly changing rural economy in the 1970s. In the 1960s, Ireland was still rural, conservative and Catholic, with storylines like a character going on the Pill containing a shock value unthinkable a decade later. By the late 1970s, Ireland was becoming less rural, less conservative and less Catholic. Ironically, one of the biggest shock issues of the early show, the use of contraception, became less of a shock when in 1979 the provision of contraception was legalised, albeit with tight controls, in the very year the show was taken off air.

The changing nature of Irish society was shown in the soap operas that replaced The Riordans. After the short interregnum Bracken, came Glenroe, another 'rural' show set, unlike The Riordans, on the fringes of a town close to Dublin, with some characters living in an urban housing estate. Even the central characters, a farmer and his father Miley Byrne and Dinny Byrne, blurred the urban and rural worlds in a way that Tom Riordan never did, by turning their farm into an open farm for urban people to visit, and selling their produce in their own shop in the local town. After two decades that show itself was axed, leaving RTÉ with only one major homegrown soap opera, one that has no rural aspect at all, and is set in inner-city Dublin, Fair City.

• The Riordans at IMDb
• Critical analysis of The Riordans
• Stills image of 'Pat Barry' (Gabriel Byrne) with 'Tom Riordan' (John Cowley)