A loss of innocence?

Television and Irish society, 196072

By (author) Robert Savage

Publication date:

03 May 2010

Length of book:

416 pages

Publisher

Manchester University Press

Dimensions:

216x138mm

ISBN-13: 9780719077852

This book explores the evolution of Ireland’s national television service during its first tumultuous decade, addressing how the medium helped undermine the conservative political, cultural and social consensus that dominated Ireland into the 1960s. It also traces the development of the BBC and ITA in Northern Ireland, considering how television helped undermine a state that had long governed without consensus.

Using a wide array of new archival sources and extensive interviews Savage illustrates how an increasingly confident television service upset political, religious and cultural elites who were profoundly uncomfortable with the changes taking place around them. Savage argues that during this period television was not a passive actor, but an active agent often times aggressively testing the limits of the medium and the patience of governments. Television helped facilitate a process of modernisation that slowly transformed Irish society during the 1960s.

This book will be essential for those interested in contemporary Irish political and cultural history and readers interested in media history, and cultural studies.

Acknowledgements
List of figures
Introduction
1. *A compromise with commerce?* The origins of Irish television
2. *‘A stanger among us’*: Edward Roth and the establishment of Telefis Éireann
3. *An instrument of public policy?* Political culture and television in Lemass’s Ireland
4. *Transition*
5. *‘Irresponsible, amateurish, lacking in research, lacking in fact’?* The limits of public service broadcasting and the 1969 7 days tribunal
6. Religious broadcasting
7. *Radharc*, the Catholic Church and cultural shift in modern Ireland
8. *Finding a voice?* The Irish language and Irish television
9. *A box of troubles*, television and Northern Ireland
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Not only is Savage's book detailed, scholarly and a highly valuable contribution, but he has woven it together to make it eminently readable

Iarfhlaith Watson, Irish Studies, 01/08/2012

... a scholarly and well-written book.

Savage presents a nuanced description of the relationship between the Catholic Church and RTE.

The scholarliness of the book is manifest not only in the extensive literature to which Savage refers, but also in the interviews he conducted and the range of archives through which he trawled.