Dark Gael Blowing

Starring Diarmuid de Faoite as television crime correspondent Cathal Mac Iarnáin and Maria Doyle Kennedy, seething with quiet fury as Cathal’s wife Mairéad, Corp + Anam casts a harsh eye over Ireland’s social, cultural and domestic problems. Comic relief is in short supply.

“Yes,” laughs De Faoite. “I’m not sure how many jokes there are in the four episodes. I’d say you could count them on one hand. That’s what makes it a really intense viewing experience. You get in there and it’s unrelenting and gripping and ugly.”
Mac Iarnáin chases stories whose themes will be familiar to Irish viewers – boy-racer teens, corrupt Gardaí, health service incompetence and internet paedophilia. Writer and director Darach Mac Con Iomaire’s aim was to make an ‘HBO-style’ Irish-language drama. This can’t have been easy without an HBO-style budget.
“You just have to work harder!” De Faoite proffers. “With a role like Cathal where you’re in every second scene, the shoot was work, work, work, go home and shovel a few lines into your head for the following day. There was certainly no glamour, I’ll tell you that.”
Cathal is single-minded, selfish, underhand, an absent father and husband, a chauvinist and even his boss describes him as a “bollocks”.
“I remember speaking to Darach, and comparing Cathal to a Jack Russell. Jack Russells are fierce and fiercely loyal, but they often suffer from poor eyesight as well so they may bite the hand that feeds them. Cathal has those qualities. He’ll sink his teeth into a story and he will not let go, no matter what, but at huge expense to the people he is investigating, or to himself and particularly to his personal life.
“It’s too easy sometimes when you have a lead character who is likeable and does everything you’d want Prince Charming to do. People aren’t like that. When he shows a heroic side, which isn’t all that often, that’s exceptional for him.”
Despite his success as a journalist, Cathal’s position is threatened by office politics, partly because of his aggressive relationship with his female news editor Deirdre. Younger and perhaps better educated than her star correspondent, she lacks field experience and has none of Cathal’s journalistic chops.
“I think first and foremost she represents the dumbing down of journalism, corporate journalism, if you know what I mean. That said, the fact that she is a woman doesn’t help at all.”
Cathal could be reasonably described as an unreconstructed chauvinist.
“Oh yes, but modern enough to keep it covered up!” laughs De Faoite.
While the investigations form the main plot of each episode, Cathal’s strained domestic life is equally important. The family is held together in a delicate equilibrium of habit and despair that threatens to tip at any moment.
“The tension is equal to, if not even greater than, what’s going on in terms of his work life,” says De Faoite. “You can really cut the atmosphere with a knife. When you spend a day shooting that, you’d really need to go home to domestic bliss if you had it!”
It’s always a risk to have a dislikeable lead character, but you can’t help but root for the reporter, if only because the people he investigates are just as bad and frequently worse. Corp & Anam does not draw a huge distinction between the ‘good guys’ and the ‘baddies’.
“Nobody,” notes De Faoite, “has a clean sheet. Cathal has issues with authority and with the system. I think people, especially in this day and age, can admire that. Maybe there’s that Irish thing of the loveable rogue, although he’s really not charming; he can be if he needs charm to get to the bottom of a story. I think how he may gain the audience’s fondness is because he’ll take on the Gardaí, the HSE, whoever. If he doesn’t, well, I guess there won’t be a second series!”

Corp & Anam begins Wednesday, February 16 at 9.30pm on TG4.