Michael Duggan

What has Netflix got against Ireland?

All their characters seem to hate the countryside

  • From Spectator Life
A still from Bodkin (Netflix)

Early in the first episode of Holding, an adaptation of Graham Norton’s novel of the same name, a young, ambitious, foul-tempered detective is called to a village in west Cork where human remains have been found. Before handing the investigation over and returning to the city, she spits out her contempt: ‘I’m not spending weeks down here in the arse end of nowhere.’ Similarly, in the first episode of Bodkin, a Netflix series released last year, a young, ambitious foul-tempered journalist is sent to investigate decades-old disappearances in the same region and forced to team up with an American podcaster and his researcher. ‘I’m stuck consulting on a true-crime podcast in the arse end of nowhere,’ she declares.

De Valera’s dream is being pulverised into dust right in front of our eyes, one mini-series at a time

It’s not looking good for West Cork, is it? One ‘arse-end-of-nowhere’ after another. But it’s the same all over Ireland. In the 2023 Liam Neeson thriller In the Land of Saints and Sinners, a young IRA man in a tiny Donegal village calls it ‘the back arse of bleeding nowhere.’ What is going on here? Why the compulsive unoriginality ? It’s an easy, brash way to signal that the era of quaint, on-screen rural Irishry is dead and buried. ‘Micksploitation’ movies are a thing of the past; viewers are in for something very different. 

Each production goes on to concoct its own mix of flippancy, nihilism and absurdity – the full Netflixian zeitgeist. In Bodkin, when Gilbert, the podcaster, admires the view, an elderly lady sighs, ‘All I see is shit. Fields and fields of shit.’ This is a new Ireland, contemptuous of its fake, idyllic past.

These dark green comedies signal that a particular political vision has been abandoned, the Ireland evoked by Éamon de Valera in his now widely derided, semi-infamous 1943 St Patrick’s Day address. De Valera, then Taoiseach, dreamed of a country where people ‘satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit,’ a land ‘bright with cosy homesteads… with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens.’ This ‘happy, vigorous, spiritual’ Ireland would be the home of ‘a people living the life that God desires that men should live.’

Yeah, right. In Holding, the heroine Evelyn, in her early 30s, abandons Tinder-scrolling to seek out sex with one of those athletic youths: Stephen, a local teenage hurler and son of Susan, Evelyn’s sister’s partner. Their daytime tryst occurs in an abandoned ambulance, whose doors bear the graffiti ‘OCCU-RIDE’ when they swing shut.

Obituary, meanwhile – also on Netflix -–is set in Kilraven, a ‘bog-standard backwater.’ The whiff of excrement and desolation thus remains. The local yoga teacher is ‘a bit of a prozzie,’ cocaine dealers are killing each other with adulterated gear, and the narrator, an obituary writer, drums up business by bumping off nasty locals. By the final episode, Kilraven has been promoted to a ‘fucking hellhole of a fucking town’ by a doomed German visitor.

The Church mopes around conducting funerals and near-empty Masses. ‘If there is a God, he’s an awful bollocks!’ declares a character in Holding, signalling that the natives have kicked their religion habit, replacing ‘Begorrah’ with casual vulgarity. This should be no surprise. In 2021, RTE aired Holy Fuck, a documentary celebrating Ireland’s pre-eminence among the nations in the use of bad language. Bob Geldof exclaimed, ‘Fuck and shit. Fuck yeah!’ A former Lord Mayor of Dublin offered, ‘See ya later, ya gobshite.’ ‘Sweet Mother of Holy Divine Fuck!’ said some other rent-a-gob.

In the newer depictions of rural Ireland, therefore, if you happen to hear a ‘Top of the morning’, it will probably come in the form of ‘Top of the fucking morning to yah, yah prick.’ De Valera’s dream is being pulverised into dust right in front of our eyes, one mini-series at a time.

But it is not as if the real country is not supplying its own proofs of the old order’s collapse. Only 58 per cent in rural areas now consider themselves religious. Headlines like ‘Cocaine is “easier to order online than pizza” in rural Ireland’ are newspaper staples. Bambi Thug, the self-declared witch who was placed sixth at Eurovision, hails from a small country town and is a prolific swearer: ‘Non-binaries for the fucking win!’ Micheál Martin, Éamon de Valera’s successor as leader of Fianna Fáil leader, congratulated Bambi for ‘doing Ireland proud.’

Nevertheless, de Valera’s speech hasn’t lost its hold on the Irish mind, if only at times through mockery and misquotation. Some form of his Ireland occasionally creeps back onto screens. Audiences tired of the nihilistic zeitgeist can enjoy anomalies like 2020’s Wild Mountain Thyme, a rural romance of the old school. And more serious second thoughts can sometimes occur. In an essay for the Dublin Review, Molly McCloskey recounted a respected theatre director suggesting that, given how hard the Irish had fallen for materialism in the noughties, de Valera’s envisioned world was ‘one we should not so loftily dismiss.’

Earlier this year, referendums on family and home life showed that some connective tissue between traditional and contemporary Ireland remains. In huge numbers, the country said ‘No’ to changing the constitution’s declaration that the family is founded on marriage; ‘No’ to saying the family could be founded on ‘other durable relationships’; ‘No’ to deleting lines about women’s centrality to family, home and nation.

There were many causes behind the vote, but one can’t rule out last-gasp resistance to total de-Devalerisation. The drafting of the very clauses that today’s politicians wanted to erase was personally supervised by de Valera in 1937. So, despite the Netflixification of Ireland, the question just about remains whether the nation is ready to let go – truly, entirely and irrevocably – of the Ireland that Dev dreamed of.

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