Will Penn stirs the pot with his review of Housewife of the Year.
At first glance, Housewife of the Year might sound like a quaint relic of Ireland’s television past, a harmless competition celebrating domestic skill and homemaking prowess. But in the award-winning documentary of the same name, director Ciaran Cassidy peels back the polished veneer to reveal a more unsettling story. Through intimate interviews and shimmering archive footage, the film explores how a seemingly innocuous contest reflected and reinforced the narrow, restrictive roles available to Irish women across the show’s lifetime from 1967 to 1995. It’s a fascinating, and in some ways flawed, examination of media and the quiet ways social pressure, domesticity and the Catholic Church embedded themselves in these women’s lives.
An area in which the film struggles is linking everything together in an integrated narrative. Now, coherence isn’t something that any documentary has to achieve – take, for example, The Act of Killing, which presents opposing narratives of how war criminals justify their pasts, how history is written and the legacy of terrible acts of violence. Housewife of the Year doesn’t do this, and yes, it readily explores the myriad ways in which de Valera’s Ireland was no place for a woman. However, it never quite reconciles those societal trends with the earnest expression that this competition was among some of the most significant moments of its participants’ lives. This is a complex dynamic, one that the documentary falls shy of depicting. And for a viewer born outside the lifetime of the show and its sociopolitical context, I don’t feel much closer to the competition. How did you qualify? When did preliminary rounds happen? What was Gay Byrne like offstage? How was the catering? There are hints toward each of these, but they’re insinuated rather than explained.
That is not to detract from the excellent interviewing and research that underpin the film. The central stars shine bright. The confessions of women, juxtaposed against the grainy, twinkling footage, underscore that this narrative was trotted out to subdue and cover over the cracks. Gay Byrne croons over them, insisting on holding hands with them while offering leering remarks about when their next child is on the way. The contrast between this abundant footage and the women presenting themselves today as something more than a “housewife” feels like a redress. The category is aspirational, imaginary, presented on national television to underline what was understood by a good woman – and therefore a bad woman. The documentary presents the case that RTÉ and Gay Byrne didn’t need to explicitly argue that women belonged in the home – the competition’s very existence, its prime-time slot and its celebratory tone made this ideology appear consensual, even desirable.
One can only imagine that its participants feel a sense of justice in the recognition of this dynamic. Some participants describe themselves as child brides, or tell of how they were thrown into Magdalene laundries at the slightest hint of transgression or left to fend for themselves after being abandoned by drunk or neglectful husbands. One interviewee, Miriam, describes the happy years living and working as a nurse in London that were stripped away after she could no longer work following her marriage. The documentary dwells on the suffering. Anne describes how her time on the show springboarded her into birth control advocacy following the experience of not being able to feed her 13 children. The participants and their endless optimism are a reminder that despair is a luxury that the oppressed so rarely choose. The film soars in showcasing the participants’ hope and resilience.
Ultimately, Housewife of the Year succeeds as an act of historical reclamation. The film offers something more valuable than coherence: it provides a platform for voices that were once reduced to media spectacle to reclaim their own stories. By allowing them to speak for themselves decades later, Cassidy’s film becomes less about the competition itself and more about the enduring power of women to redefine themselves beyond the roles that society penned them into. These women were never just “housewives” – they were complex individuals whose dreams, struggles and agency were flattened into a single, suffocating noun.
Housewife of the Year was released in cinemas on 22nd November 2024 and broadcast on RTÉ on 2nd June 2025 and is available to watch now on the RTÉ Player.
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