‘Housewife Of The Year’: Galway Review

Dir. Cieran Cassidy. Republic of Ireland, 2024. 77mins.

Initially, it’s wryly-amusing to think of a time when women might compete in a live-televised national competition to find a country’s ‘Housewife Of The Year’. Weren’t things so simple back in 1969, with elaborate fruit salads, ‘pork tropicana’ (part of the preparation of a ‘two-course meal, budgeted effectively’) and ‘personality interviews’. Ah, the good old days of five kids and no car seatbelts – wasn’t life grand? Part of the skill of Ciaran Cassidy’s (Jihad Jane) documentary about an Irish event which ran from 1969 to, alarmingly, 1995, is how it lays bare the sexism and misogyny hiding in plain sight in a tight-fisted theocracy. 

Lays bare the sexism and misogyny hiding in plain sight in a tight-fisted theocracy

One contestant had 13 children in 10 years – easy to achieve when twins run in the family and the country you live in won’t countenance contraception. In fact, Ireland’s very constitution placed the woman legislatively in the home, drowning them in children they couldn’t afford.  Housewife Of The Year is enough at times to make Miss World seem enlightened, and will receive a domestic release through Wildcard after CPH: Dox and Galway outings.

Cassidy’s slim documentary is sympathetic to all its participants, refusing to score easy laughs, judge, or adopt a tone of superiority – neither does it rage, though, even when the situation might warrant a harder take. A single mother being evicted from her flat on a trumped-up excuse of prostitution is presented in the same wry tone as one contestant’s poem: “It’s very good to be good-looking, but that’s no excuse for bad cooking.” 

“Why did we go along with all these things?” laments one former participant. Well, on one level, the winner would get a free cooker and £300 in cash (an unbelievable sum of money if you had those 13 mouths to feed and were forced to go with your empty saucepan to a church food centre for stew). On another, if you had spent your childhood in a Magdalene laundry, it might look like a validation of what you had managed to achieve. Generations of women in Ireland were forced to give up work when they married and have big families (no contraception allowed) without any chance of escape (no divorce allowed) or deviation (the church turned the population into a watchful militia on its women, keen to pass judgement on transgressions).

Cassidy has found many of the original contestants, who return to the empty stage to recall their experiences – both as participants in the competition and their lives outside it. Some of these stories are heart-breaking in their simplicity: women making do with the roles their country and the church assigned them, impossible tasks leading to generational poverty. Others aren’t dealt with in enough depth, in particular the teenager sent off to the Magdalene workhouse after a pharmacist developed her polaroids of a teenage day out and reported her to the local priest.

Cassidy splices modern talking-heard footage with shaky VHS drawn from the national archives, making a virtue of its technical paucity in a strong edit by Cara Holmes. There’s possibly a little too much nostalgic fondness in the tone when it comes to interviews conducted onstage by Ireland’s most-treasured emcee Gay Byrne, now dead. Ultimately, women were ruined and lost their lives for reasons shown here, and there is a feeling that the film might have made more of an impact if he Cassidy had completely ditched the nostalgia. Some may find it more amusing than others. But respect is the operating mechanism. And certainly, the housewives of the year deserve it. 

“Mary finished with a banana surprise,” intones the – naturally male – commentary on a contestant’s cooking. And certainly, a surprise was coming. It just took too long, for reasons Cassidy isn’t keen to examine. Housewife Of The Year is a snapshot of a time that has uncomfortable echoes and is often an uneasy watch, even as it entertains. In a country which still struggles with male violence against women – as recent controversies regarding the judicial system and the armed forces prove – it’s a difficult film to relax into, for good reason.