Facts get in the way of nostalgia

RTÉ’s new season of The Way We Were tackles healthcare, crime and punishment how our food tastes have changed

Talk to anyone over the age of 50 and they’ll tell you that the Ireland of today would have been unimaginable to them as a younger person.

But how is it better than it was? And do we tend to look back with rose-tinted glasses at the ‘good old days’?

The romance of nostalgia battles the hard facts of our lived reality in 20th century Ireland as a cast of well-known Irish personalities and social historians look back in a new series of the popular RTÉ series,

The Way We Were.

Among the contributors are broadcasters Mike Murphy, Francis Brennan, John Creedon, Ciara Kelly, Brendan Courtney, Eileen Dunne, Mick Clifford and Paul Williams.

Entertainers Pat Shortt, Sue Collins, Katherine Lynch and Michael Harding join in too, with a host of social historians and commentators taking part in each episode, remembering a different aspect of life in Ireland over the past 100 years.

One of the themes this season is health and wellbeing, from the evolution of our public healthcare system to the eradication of the many harrowing diseases of childhood and poverty.

Our attitudes to women’s healthcare and mental illness, too, have changed utterly for the better.

Food has also evolved over the decades. The way we ate in Ireland has changed as the 20th century saw a shift in how we enjoyed meals.

Having a cooked dinner in the middle of the day went out of fashion, and brunch and elevenses made their way into our daily routines.

Fasting customs disappeared, the ‘snackification’ of our daily diet became normal, and the arrival of ‘foreign’ foods and cookery shows on television reflected our changing tastes in food.

Another theme in the new series is crime and punishment. The chequered history of the Garda Síochána and the shockingly late abolition of the death penalty is examined, along with the criminalisation of children and the changing face of the prison system.

How we learn about crime has changed too, and contributors will discuss how crime has become entertainment with the reporting of crime gang culture and the terrifying escalation of the drug wars in the 1980s as heroin was flooded into the country. n The Way We Were, Wednesday, 9.35pm, RTÉ One