Housewife of The Year - how we made the acclaimed new documentary

Filmmaker Ciaran Cassidy introduces his acclaimed new documentary Housewife of the Year, now showing in cinemas nationwide - watch an exclusive clip above.

When we started making Housewife of the Year, during the height of lockdown, we weren't sure if there was going to be enough material to sustain a documentary.

I had known about the competition from when I was a child. One of my neighbours in Cavan was a finalist and I remember it was a huge deal in the town. After all, thousands of women entered each year and the final was a glitzy affair broadcast on live television with none other than Gay Byrne at the helm.

We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences

Listen: Oliver Callan talks to former Housewife Of The Year winners

The competition always stayed in my head but it was only years later that it occurred to me that it could be a strong vehicle through which to explore the stories and experiences of a generation of Irish women.

The Republic of Ireland is celebrating one hundred years of its existence and probably the defining story of this young, formerly Catholic country is how harshly the State treated women. It was a hostile country to be a woman in.

Additionally, the role of the housewife is enshrined in the constitution. Article 41.2 says that the
state will 'endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to
engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home'.

Watch the trailer for Housewife Of The Year

It was within this context that Housewife of the Year existed. The competition was intended as a celebration of the role of the housewife and our intention with this film was to explore the gap between what the audience saw on television and the reality of life for women at the time, before things started to change.

We knew the only people who could tell this story were the contestants themselves. However, we weren't sure if they would want to talk to us. So started a long process of tracking down and writing letters to ex-contestants all over the country.

Thanks to them, the film became not only the story of a uniquely Irish competition but a profile of the resilience and spirit of a generation of Irish women.

Woman’s Way sponsored the competition and we were able to source names and general locations from old copies of the magazine in the National Library. It must have been surreal, years after appearing in the show, to receive a letter from documentary makers not only wanting to hear about their experiences on the show but also asking questions about their lives away from the competition. Some letters went unanswered. But to our surprise and delight, many women expressed interest in taking part.

We travelled around the country and conducted audio interviews with the women. Meeting them in person, without the intrusion of a camera crew, allowed us to form relationships, build trust and give them the space to tell their stories.

During our development shoot, the first woman we filmed with told me that she was going to tell me something that she had never spoken about publicly. She explained that when she was sixteen, she had given birth to a child. At the time, there was still a huge stigma around being an unmarried mother. It was a source of embarrassment to her father and she was shunned by her neighbours.

Years later, in the 1980s, she was a happily married mother. Her son entered her into Housewife of the Year but the stigma of once being an unmarried mother lingered. She was terrified that if she won, her past would be splashed across the newspapers. It was a powerful story that shone a light on the judgmental, close-minded Ireland of the not-so-distant past.

Right then, we knew then we had something special on our hands. Each house we visited, ex-contestants shared with us their lived experiences of marriage bars, lack of contraception, Magdalene laundries, financial vulnerability, boredom, and shame, as well as their recollections of being contestants in the competition.

We wanted to explore how this generation of women was treated within society through the prism of the show, but we would have had no film if the contestants weren’t so generous and giving with their personal stories.

Thanks to them, the film became not only the story of a uniquely Irish competition but a profile of the resilience and spirit of a generation of Irish women.

After more than three years of working on this film, it is an honour to finally share it with Irish cinema audiences.

Housewife of the Year is currently in Irish cinemas nationwide.