The popular soap that is Ros na Rún returns on Tuesday September 6 for its 21st season on TG4.
Máire Eilís Ní Fhlaithearta and Fionnuala Ní Fhlatharta are two long-standing cast members and indeed good friends, ready for the highs and lows of the new run.
This new season marks Máire Eilís’s 21st year with the soap, she is a veteran who has been there from the start, in all weathers and humours. “21 years ago I never thought when I started here that I’d still be here now, married, three children later, living next door and still working here.”
Inevitably, the crews seem young to her, the sound and camera people, the trainees, the new actors too.. Do the younger actors try and learn from her, or are they cocksure enough to go their own way? ‘’Being honest, nobody’s cocksure. When you come in, it’s like every soap - no matter where you have worked, everywhere is a little bit different.”
Máire Eilís, in her welcoming, hospitable fashion, brings the new folk around the set. “Where’s the loo, where’s the canteen, what do I have to do next, where do you hang out? You kind of pull them along and say – look, did anybody show you this?“
She says the cast and crew have had a good social life over the two decades of the soap’s existence, although significantly less for Máire Eilís who has three children, the youngest of whom is starting school this week.
Máire Éilis Ní Fhlaithearta (Caitríona), Máire Uí Dhroighneán (Máire), Macdara Ó Fátharta, Fionnuala Ní Fhlatharta (Berni).
The Ros na Rún set is in Spiddal and she was born and bred in nearby Baile an tSléibhe. So what is coming up for her character Caitríona? “Well do you know what, the usual,” she says in her no-nonsense way.
“Tragedies and comedies, love triangles, of course there will be many. I think that’s what makes soaps, you know yourself, the affairs and the flings and the `who fancies who’ and whatever. I’ve had my fair share of those story-lines over the years, you’re kind of wondering is there anyone left? That’s why we like new people coming in, there’s hope,” she says, with a mischievous laugh. Towards the end of our chat, she assures me that there will be `a sad start' to the soap on this occasion.
Is Ros na Rún predicated upon an entirely different universe from the way life is in Connemara? “Sometimes you hear stories in real life and you go, `if we had that in the soap they wouldn’t believe us.’ Tragedy hits some families and you go, `if we had that in the soap it would be far-fetched, that couldn’t happen in real life’ - and yet it does, unfortunately.”
“Now obviously when you come to the crazier story-lines, with drugs sex and rock n roll, you kind of don’t want some of that to be real. Maybe we kind of think, `no, that couldn’t happen in real life, the crazy affairs, or how they happen. But crazy things happen in real life that wouldn’t be crazy in soap-land, you think. “
Soap can reveal secrets which are gone to their graves with the characters themselves, known by few, if any, other characters in the drama. Máire Eilís confirms this.
“Caitríona, many moons ago, had an affair with her stepson, Donnacha (Eoin Mac Diarmada), and, yes, to this day very few people know about it, as in the locals. Caitríona told her mother that it wasn’t her husband Vince (Paul McCloskey) who cheated many moons ago, it was actually herself. But she never went into who. So, yes, to this day, only the viewers really know the whole story and maybe two other people in the actual soap.” A stepson? That’s almost incestuous? “ I know, exactly, I was a bit like,`oh no, that’s awful.’ “
Donnacha since committed suicide in jail, so the possibility of him telling the secret is gone, presumably to Caitriona's relief. “He (Eoin) is one of our writers now, so there you go, it all goes around!”
Fionnuala Ní Fhlatharta (Berni) and Máire Eilís Ní Fhlaithearta (Caitríona)
A Carraroe woman, Fionnuala Ní Fhlatharta, who plays Berni Seoige (Ni Neachtain), studied the same Media / Communications course in UCG some 21 years ago as her name-sake Máire Eilís Ní Fhlatharta. UCG is where they first met, unaware that soon they would be working together on the same set for many a year after.
"At the time I was very involved with the drama society in college and Trevor Ó Clochartaigh was the Executive Producer at the time. He had seen me in a few plays, and he called me for an audition and Máire Eilís as well - I thought I'd become an editor."
"We're very good friends, in later years she introduced me to her cousin who I then married. Máire Eilís's kids would be my kids' cousins as well." There is a family connection too in that fact that her uncle, Tom Sailí Ó Flaithearta played Cóilín Ó Catháin in the series down through the years.
Fionnuala too has had her fair share of dramatic storylines. In recent times, she was obliged to deal with her fiancée Cathal's murder/suicide plot, set to take place on the day of the wedding. The chilling saga came to a horrific end when her son Evan killed the man she had intended to marry. "It was fairly heavy on, but one good thing about that story-line was that it had to deal with mental illness that Cathal's character was suffering. When they develop stories (in Ros na Rún), they don't rush into them, the seed might have been planted two years before and then they develop it.
"Some dramas, something happens very quick and perhaps too obvious sometimes." Filming takes place over six months of the year and in downtime, there are occasional voice-over or stage work for Fionnuala. She enjoyed her role in a six week run in a Jimmy Murphy play, Cinneadh na Circe (in the original English, The Hen Night Epiphany) at the Taibhdhearc theatre in Galway in April.
Fionnuala tells me that this season in Ros na Rún there will be "a wedding, a funeral and another fire," she laughs, "I know that much." She also believes there will be "a bit of competition" between Berni and Caitríona.
"I love being in scenes with Máire Eilís because we know each other so well at this stage and we work so well together. I actually look forward to working with her, sometimes you are involved in other story-lines. There was one season where we were hardly in any scene together and you kind of miss it."
Paddy Kehoe
