(Raidió Teilifís Éireann, 1993-present)

I have long wanted to write of my contradictory love for Nationwide, and a critical review of the long-running early evening magazine show finally felt appropriate following a year that began with a scandal and ended with a general election. At the time of writing, although a government has yet to be formed and is not likely to be until early into 2025, the November election confirmed the Republic’s contented complacency with centre right political representation. At the same time, the television and radio broadcaster, Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ), faced a reputational scandal that hit headlines in 2023, culminated in early 2024, and was finally comprehensively featured in the broadcaster’s September 2024 year-end report (Coughlan 2024; Beesley 2024; McDonald 2024). The affair surrounded undisclosed payments to the broadcaster’s then-highest-paid talent, Late Late Show (1962–) presenter Ryan Tubridy. Represented as deceit, managerial incompetence and cronyism, and immoral overpayment during a cost-of-living crisis, the revelations gave many of the broadcasters’ detractors an excuse (they likely sought anyway) to lash out at the public institution, and refuse to pay their obligatory TV licence. The whole debacle resulted in a major budget shortfall for the broadcaster, requiring for face-saving reasons a degree of institutional restructuring and programming changes. Nationwide, however, remained immune from the restructuring elsewhere within the broadcaster’s campus, and the show continued its mission of tourist board boosterism, mild historical and cultural education, and its emphasis on small, regional business endeavours; all as an innocuous and anodyne representation of the best of Irishness and the best way to be Irish.

As an immigrant from America where we do not (really) have a national public broadcaster,[1] and a television scholar, I may be the rare person who delights in paying my licence fee, and the even rarer under-70 who adores RTÉ and Nationwide in particular. In the TV History module I teach, I ask students to debate the relative merits of commercial, public service, and hybrid models of broadcast television that developed after World War II on both sides of the Atlantic. We examine the ideological effects of each, the ideal consumer addressed and created by American television and the ideal citizen historically hailed by fully public service systems like Britain’s BBC. The Irish state broadcaster is caught somewhere in the middle, funded both by commercial revenue streams and by licence returns. This middle-ground hybrid of commercial and public service has predictably deep resonances in the long duration of Ireland’s centre-right governments and the country’s distinctive combination of social liberalisation and run-of-the-mill neoliberalism. Anna McCarthy (2021) and Patricia Cormack (2005) have both written about The Angelus – the minute-long audio/visual call to prayer that still plays on RTÉ radio and television every day at 6PM – and the evolving version of Ireland and Irishness it presents. Nationwide does similar cultural work, but from a firmly secular and capitalist footing. The programme delights in the small business achievements that are the hallmark of neoliberalism’s project to make itself appear benign; it acknowledges immigrants’ and non-White people’s experiences rarely and usually only to celebrate their assimilation; and it paints a nakedly old-fashioned, exclusive, small-“n”-nationalist, rural idyll, ye olde misty cliffs and mossy ruins vision of what it means to be Irish. I love it.

My attraction to Nationwide is possible because, while I am an immigrant, I am a White American immigrant who arrived because of a well-paying job. I am the immigrant who, when confronted with strangers ranting against immigrants (which happens more than you would think), is always told “oh I don’t mean you”. So, as with all my writing about Whiteness, I do it from a position of safety that I have to call attention to, because it is what allows critique. In that context, I can enjoy the way Nationwide relishes the absolute baldness of its retrograde vision of Ireland. I am captivated by the beauty of its predominantly rural locations, while being very aware that the Ireland of Nationwide is not my Ireland, and I am only welcome in this semi-fictional land as a tourist. I marvel also at the nation-building character of the historical contexts it provides, while laughing at how, evidently, I – the rare White American with no Irish connections – am not part of this Ireland. The Ireland of Nationwide is essentially a theme park or a historical walking tour. Its embrace of that status and refusal of anything that might challenge a peaceful, beautiful, economically vibrant and successful vision of Ireland, is so unrealistic that it becomes a fascinating cultural artefact. The programme’s opening credit sequence, and a six-part series celebrating the 10^th anniversary of the Wild Atlantic Way will illustrate what I mean.

The title sequence definitively establishes the programme’s representation of Irishness. Its designations as “nation” and “wide” are purposeful: it hails both the entirety of the island, but also claims that group as a nation. In order to exist, that collective has to agree on a generalised definition of itself, a set of characteristics it shares, and equally a vision of what it is not (Anderson 1991). The repeated graphic overlay of spinning concentric circles evokes a lens being pulled into focus, a concept strengthened with the inclusion of a close-up shot of a mobile television camera slung over the shoulder of a camera operator. Rather than the analytical eye these features might indicate in the opening of a more investigative show, here they evoke the nature photographer also pictured in the sequence, and the ability for television (vision at a distance, after all) to bring the entire nation into focus. The remainder of the sequence then tells us what that nation is: Irish dancers who seem to be in the middle of the woods, a bodhrán player, a tractor harvesting wheat, and endless shots of greenness (forests, fields, cliffs) and pristine coastal waters. Interestingly, the one sport included is soccer – not the national Gaelic football or hurling – and it is featured as one of only three urban shots (one in which children play on a lawn with the Aviva stadium in the background) in the sequence. In this way, soccer, often more associated (in Ireland) with urban working classes as opposed to GAA’s more culchie flavour, becomes part of the implicit diversity-washing in the title sequence. Brief overhead shots of urban Dublin and Cork become interruptions to the rural idyll, just as the shots of a young wheelchair user and the quick shot of occasional presenter Nigerian-Irish Zainab Boladale feel like obligatory insertions into the generalized old-timey, misty, mossy beauty of the rural and wild parts of the island, called on here to represent the nation of Nationwide.

The six Wild Atlantic Way episodes (broadcast from November 18 to 29 in 2024) then repeat the show’s formula. The voice over drone footage of sunny days on the west coast tells us that the Wild Atlantic Way is a branding mechanism for 2600km of coast stretching from Donegal to Cork and that the marketing initiative “supports thousands of jobs in some of the most remote parts of the West of Ireland”. After this secondary title sequence, a chipper middle-aged white female presenter (Anne Cassin or Bláthnaid Ní Chofaigh) welcomes viewers to that week’s location, and the local business owners who will feature. The show is typically split into two parts, so this structure is repeated in the half hour. During each segment, relevant webpage addresses also appear onscreen, funnelling the tourist-viewer towards more information. In the November 20 episode alone, ten different websites appear in addition to extensive interviews with representatives from Fáilte Ireland and the National Surf Centre.[2] This episode is designed somewhat like a “greatest hits” of Irish tourist history, with part one mentioning the Spanish Armada, Countess Markievicz, a trad music group, and W.B. and Jack Yeats. The second section focuses on the booming surf lesson industry, and Strandhill People’s Market, and how that project assists the development of small businesses and supports local entrepreneurs. Throughout the show on-location interviews are intercut with slow moving drone-shots of stunning landscapes accompanied by calming piano scores, linking the lush green and blue of landscape tourism directly to small local business boosterism. This unabashed link persists in every episode of Nationwide that I have seen (although I do not pretend to have made a scientific study of the programme’s thirty-year run). Occasional urban episodes like a three-part series on the re-naming of Dublin’s O’Connell Street (aired in May 2024), replace landscape tourism with historical tourism, but nevertheless forge the same link to entrepreneurialism and local businesses.

The entire show begs the question: who is this for? My Irish friends report only elderly relatives watching. It has the disposition of a tourism brochure, but RTÉ is not widely available outside Ireland for potential foreign tourists. Tourism by Irish people within Ireland is of course a possible audience, but the show’s airtime of 7PM is too early for most people working and/or raising families to be in front of the television (leaving aside the challenges of reaching any audience on legacy television). It has the comforting lack of critique or challenge that might appeal to older viewers’ nostalgia. George Lipsitz (1986) has written compellingly about fictional television as a sort of cultural and ideological instruction manual. When I first moved to Ireland, I sought out the national broadcaster for exactly that purpose. RTÉ, I knew, would show me, intentionally or not, what a semi-commercial but government sanctioned national image of Irishness was. Foreigners in this Ireland are almost always tourists, occasionally partners of local Irish people and, occasionally, business owners and promoters of tourism. That rarity and specificity paints a precise picture of a tourist business nation, beautiful, lush, and welcoming for an assimilationist figure who embodies the centre-right ideals of inclusivity via entrepreneurialism: in other words, not me.

Notes

[1] PBS, the US’s Public Broadcasting Service, relies heavily on viewer donations and funding from charitable organizations, with less and less funding allocated to it by Congress. The channel’s reach is miniscule compared to its commercial competition. An American could easily go their whole life without ever seeing PBS, which puts it in a very different position to RTÉ in Ireland.

[2] Leitrimtourism.com (for the 4 km of the 2600 that pass through that county), SpanishArmadaIreland.com, sligowalks.com, TheWildAtlanticWay.com, discoverdrumcliffe.com, sligo.ie, themodel.ie, yeatssociety.com, countysligosurfclub.com, and GoStrandhill.com