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151 CMK: How did you first get involved in documentary making, Mary? MR: I started out as a producer/director in RTÉ (Radio Telefís Éireann) in the mid-1980s and stayed for almost twenty years. RTÉ took you in and trained you from scratch – there was no equivalent training outside at the time. I had been a print journalist, writing long, in-depth articles for In Dublin and Magill magazines, and so current affairs and documentary making would have been my natural home in television. While I did work in current affairs, on Today Tonight, for a number of years, it was to be a long time before I got the chance to make documentaries. CMK: Did you choose an area to specialise in? MR: RTÉ didn’t like the idea of producers wanting to confine themselves to particular areas, at least during their early years. Drama and documentary would have been regarded as the pinnacle; only people with pretty considerable experience were allowed to get their hands on either. Most of us had to do jamborees and fillers for quite a while. There was no question of being allowed to decide in your twenties, as I was, that you had something to say and that you were a documentary maker – that’s not something that arose. There was very little in terms of independent production – people weren’t ‘film-makers’ as they are now. Those that went through that RTÉ intake and training process tended to have a rather jaundiced view in that we did everything – we were expected to do everything – and if you thought that even within ten years in there that you could make a documentary or get involved with drama, you’d be laughed at. It really was a hard school. It involved getting enough stripes in enough areas to indicate to RTÉ that you would be capable of handling documentary material, documentary making. Most of my life I managed to spend in factual and current affairs – not without some opposition from RTÉ who wanted me to get involved in other things but that was very much my home. So, the training was very rigorous and very lengthy. Carol MacKeogh interviews Mary Raftery, Director of States of Fear (1999) and Cardinal Secrets (2002) CMK: Was that fair enough as a system given the responsibility of documentary making? MR: Well yes and no – a very good system to produce a particular type of creature which was very much the sort of creature that RTÉ wanted at the time. It was quite narrow really. The kind of documentary that RTÉ made tended to be a bit self-indulgent at the time. RTÉ had quite a narrow view of documentary – largely one that would be either commemorative or laudatory, or both. Very often they would be commissioned by RTÉ, rather than producers suggesting their own ideas. But if you knew there was an anniversary coming up – of a major figure or institution – then there was a reasonable chance of a commission . It was very much the state broadcaster’s obligations that were to the fore. Other kinds of documentaries made entailed a lot of quite lengthy and interesting expositions of different ways of life, particularly in terms of rural communities and it was all done in quite a standard way; a way that we would consider now as quite old-fashioned, kind of authoritative, didactic and very often with dramatic music. Again the emphasis was on viewing a particular type of Ireland in a particular type of way. Anything else, particularly in the area of dealing with social issues or even anything controversial, was generally regarded as being the territory of current affairs. So what that meant was that current affairs, certainly in the ’80s, was extremely strong with lots of really fine documentary-type programmes being made, very powerful, cuttingedge work – programmes that changed the country to a substantial degree. In the ’80s this wasn’t the province of documentary which was regarded as almost outside of mundane daily life by definition. I mean I’m generalising here and there were exceptions, but I think it’s a fair enough generalisation, and remained so until, really, the advent of the independent sector. That changed a lot of things. Generally, in documentary terms, it blurred a lot of those very rigid and stultifying definitions as to what was a documentary and generally shook things up in a way that was definitely a very good thing for documentary...

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