‘Down with this sort of thing’: Generation, Genre and the Undoing of Catholic Ireland in Father Ted

Channel 4’s sitcom Father Ted (1995-1998) featured a trio of priests and their housekeeper on a remote offshore Irish island. This chapter discusses the origins and making of the series, drawing on its writers’ (Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews) various published interviews and DVD commentaries. It argues that Father Ted contributed to the undoing of the place of the Catholic church in Ireland in the late twentieth century, constituting a vehicle for a generationally specific ‘structure of feeling’ that had emerged in the changing Ireland of the 1970s and 1980s as the writers availed of opportunities made possible by British television. Linehan and Mathews illustrate a key aspect of a generational disengagement from the Catholic Church and its post-Independence hegemony in Ireland in their conjoining of a distinctly ‘Irish’ cultural sensibility with ‘smart’ referencing of British and American popular cultural forms in the humour, characters and comedic form of the series. The chapter proceeds to explore how the series both references aspects of Irish society and frustrates attempts at interpretation in straightforwardly referential terms. Finally, it considers how the series has become an object of nostalgia, in 21st century Ireland, for a key period of Irish socio-cultural transition in the late twentieth century.