A Great Feast of Light: Growing Up Irish in the Television Age

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University. She is the author of several books, including The
Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret
Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

This powerful memoir of Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s is the story of a
man looking back from contemporary Toronto to his youth in Nenagh, a
small town near Dublin, at a time when Northern Ireland was in violent
turmoil and the new medium of television was bringing that violence into
homes.

The Doyles spoke both English and Gaelic. Young Doyle was born in 1957.
As a boy, he sensed that television programs like I Love Lucy and The
Jack Benny Show were changing things. Many bishops and parish priests
hated American television, and one conservative member of Parliament
declared that there was no sex in Ireland before television. Doyle’s
father, an established businessman, believed that there was more to life
than work, church, and the pub, and was one of the first in Nenagh to
acquire a television set. Little did he know that that would change the
lives of his family and the history of Ireland.

In Part 2, the Doyle family moves to Northern Ireland, where Doyle, now
10, discovers British TV, joins a soccer team, and is exposed to
violence and riots in the streets. His father was transferred again,
this time to Dublin, where John befriended loners and misfits, and was
exposed to the BBC and the violence of the IRA. By age 13, Doyle felt
both Irish and English. After a year at O’Connell’s, Doyle was moved
to Sandymount High. There, boys and girls shared classes, and he met
children of parents who wanted nothing to do with the church. He learned
about gays in an era when homosexuality was outlawed. Doyle found Dublin
liberating as “all sorts of personal freedoms” opened up to him.

Part 3 finds Doyle at Dublin’s University College, where student
politics were intense and brutal. By 1979, when the Pope visited
Ireland, Doyle had completed four years at university and had begun to
think of Ireland as a banana republic. The final seductive call to
Canada was Pierre Trudeau, seen on television as unfettered and roguish,
yet a man of integrity. Transfixed by Trudeau’s charm and integrity,
Doyle headed for Canada.

Doyle’s strong, clean prose succeeds in bringing to life a time, a
place, and a culture at a turning point in its history.