Seven Ages is a historical documentary series that was produced by Araby Productions, in association with

The O'Reilly Foundation The O'Reilly Foundation is a personal charitable trust set up in 1998 by media magnate, and former CEO of Heinz, Sir Anthony "Tony" O'Reilly. Its stated function is the funding of educational projects; the two main work areas in its active peri ...

, for

RTÉ (; ; RTÉThe É in RTÉ is pronounced as an English E () and not an Irish É ()) is an Irish public service broadcaster. It both produces and broadcasts programmes on television, radio and online. The radio service began on 1 January 1926, ...

and

BBC Northern Ireland BBC Northern Ireland is a division of the BBC and the main public broadcasting, public broadcaster in Northern Ireland. It is widely available across both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. BBC Northern Ireland is one of the four BB ...

. It charts the birth, growth and development of the Irish state since its foundation in 1921. The series was produced and directed by Seán Ó Mórdha, and the music was composed by

Bill Whelan William Michael Joseph Whelan (born 22 May 1950) is an Irish composer and musician. He is best known for composing a piece for the interval of the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest. The result, "Riverdance", was a seven-minute piece of original mus ...

. It was first broadcast in 2000. It won the Television Features and Documentary Award at the ESB National Media Awards in 2000, and was also shortlisted for the

IFTA Ifta is a former municipality in the Wartburgkreis district of Thuringia, Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Al ...

Awards.

Episodes

The series consists of seven 55-minute episodes, each dealing with a different decade, beginning with independence in 1921. The episodes do not, however, stick rigidly to their particular decade in order to avoid certain historical events from being split across two successive programmes (the

Arms Crisis The Arms Crisis was an Irish political scandal in 1970 in which Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney were dismissed as cabinet ministers for alleged involvement in a conspiracy to smuggle arms to the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland. At t ...

is an example of this). The final episode covers both the 1980s and 1990s. *Programme 1. The Birth of the New Irish State *Programme 2. Depression and the Rise of Fianna Fáil to Power *Programme 3. The Forties - Decade of Neutrality and Censorship *Programme 4. The Fifties - The Make or Break Decade *Programme 5. The Modernisation of Ireland *Programme 6. The Seventies - A Decade of Terror, Tension and Transformation *Programme 7. Haughey and FitzGerald - Great Adversaries of the Eighties

Contributors

Several important Irish figures gave interviews for the series. Among them were ex-Presidents

Patrick Hillery Patrick John Hillery (; 2 May 1923 – 12 April 2008) was an Irish Fianna Fáil politician who served as the sixth president of Ireland from December 1976 to December 1990. He also served as vice-president of the European Commission and Europea ...

and

Mary Robinson Mary Therese Winifred Robinson (; ; born 21 May 1944) is an Irish politician who served as the president of Ireland from December 1990 to September 1997. She was the country's first female president. Robinson had previously served as a senato ...

, and former

Taoisigh The Taoiseach (, ) is the head of government or prime minister of Ireland. The office is appointed by the President of Ireland upon nomination by Dáil Éireann (the lower house of the Oireachtas, Ireland's national legislature) and the office ...

Liam Cosgrave Liam Cosgrave (13 April 1920 – 4 October 2017) was an Irish Fine Gael politician who served as Taoiseach from 1973 to 1977, Leader of Fine Gael from 1965 to 1977, Leader of the Opposition from 1965 to 1973, Minister for External Affairs fro ...

Charles Haughey Charles James Haughey (; 16 September 1925 – 13 June 2006) was an Irish Fianna Fáil politician who led four governments as Taoiseach: December 1979 to June 1981, March to December 1982, March 1987 to June 1989, and June 1989 to February 1992 ...

and

Garret FitzGerald Garret Desmond FitzGerald (9 February 192619 May 2011) was an Irish Fine Gael politician, economist, and barrister who served twice as Taoiseach, serving from 1981 to 1982 and 1982 to 1987. He served as Leader of Fine Gael from 1977 to 1987 an ...

. There are also contributions from

Desmond O'Malley Desmond Joseph O'Malley (2 February 1939 – 21 July 2021) was an Irish politician who served as Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Minister for Industry and Commerce from 1977 to 1981 and 1989 to 1992, Progressive Democrats, Leader ...

and

Michael D. Higgins Michael Daniel Higgins (; born 18 April 1941) is an Irish politician, poet, broadcaster, and sociologist who has been serving as the president of Ireland since 2011. Entering national politics through the Labour Party, he served as a senator ...

, as well as historians, journalists, economists, public servants and the sons and daughters of

Civil War A civil war is a war between organized groups within the same Sovereign state, state (or country). The aim of one side may be to take control of the country or a region, to achieve independence for a region, or to change government policies.J ...

veterans.

Video and DVD release

In 2002 the series was released as a box-set on both

VHS VHS (Video Home System) is a discontinued standard for consumer-level analog video recording on tape cassettes, introduced in 1976 by JVC. It was the dominant home video format throughout the tape media period of the 1980s and 1990s. Ma ...

and

DVD The DVD (common abbreviation for digital video disc or digital versatile disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any ki ...

. The former consisted of three video cassettes, which are in

PAL Phase Alternating Line (PAL) is a color encoding system for analog television. It was one of three major analogue colour television standards, the others being NTSC and SECAM. In most countries it was broadcast at 625 lines, 50 fields (25 ...

format. The two-disc DVD set, however, was mastered in

NTSC NTSC (from National Television System Committee) is the first American standard for analog television, published and adopted in 1941. In 1961, it was assigned the designation System M. It is also known as EIA standard 170. In 1953, a second ...

format (used in North America and

Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...

). As a consequence, the DVDs are not watchable an older Irish television sets that can only accept standard PAL signals if used with a DVD player that strictly enforces output coding. Although there may be some interested in the series in America, it is assumed that the NTSC formatting was a mistake by the company that mastered the DVDs. Additionally, neither the DVD inlay nor the DVD itself has any mention of the NTSC formatting.

References

External links

* {{RTÉ Factual Documentary television series about economics Irish history television shows Irish documentary television series