My Generation (Part 1) will air on Newstalk at 7am on Saturday 15th February and will be repeated at 6pm on Sunday 16th February.

In this fast-paced and humorous documentary, Producer Francesca Lalor explores the lives of Irish people over the past century, as she hears about their memories and experiences, through the good times and the bad.
We’ve seen so many changes as a society in the past 100 years…

How we travel, how we communicate with each other, the jobs we do, the music we listen to, and the very structure of society have all changed dramatically. We now live in a modern, fast-paced, digital age of technology and opportunity. An age that must sometimes seem completely alien to those who grew up in the time before all of this.

But in spite of all of this change, we, as a people, are bonded together by our experiences, and although the generations may seem poles apart in many ways, we may well have more in common than we think…

Would the young people in today’s Ireland recognize the world of their grandparents? An Ireland before television, mobile phones, computers, the internet, CDs, family cars, central heating, cheap flights, divorce, contraception, motorways, the minimum wage?

Like never before, we have the capacity to record and capture these stories, and to store them and share them with future generations.

This documentary series aims to celebrate what is really important…the extraordinary lives of the ordinary people who make up our society.

Quotes:

“It was 1939 in Dublin, that was the year the second world war started…and there was a sense that there was something going on in another place that was affecting us…there was rationing, there was gas masks, and even though I was very very young, that feeling of the war hanging over us stayed with me for life…”

“Growing up in the tenements, there was no electric light, it was gas mantles…people had nothing, but they shared everything, they looked after each other, and there was ructions too, they gave out hell about each other, all living so close together, and there was no television so they endlessly analysed each other…when I think about it now they were the first psychiatrists they knew…”

“I worked hard in my childhood. At ten years of age, after school, I’d walk from east wall across Dublin city…there were no bridges between Butt Bridge and the open sea at that time, and I had a boxcar, and I’d pull home three-hundred weight of turf along the quays and deliver them…”

"My mother had TB, so we were moved from the tenements out to Cabra…but there was nothing built out there yet. You could see fields and forests for miles, and wild horses running…not like today."

"I left school at 14, and went to work in a hat factory on the quays in Dublin…every morning you’d see thousands of people cycling across O’Connell Bridge into work…"

"I think the country could be measured a bit through the army. When I was first serving overseas, that was 1961 in the Congo, condoms were on issue to all troops of all nations, but the chaplains heard about it and the Irish troops were not allowed get them. I remember the priests and the doctors had serious arguments about it. When I went out to serve in Cypress ten years later, condoms were on sale in the canteen, so the world had changed in ten years, Ireland had changed, and you could see the change in the army."

Broadcast Details:

My Generation (Part 1) will air on Newstalk at 7am on Saturday 15th February and will be repeated at 6pm on Sunday 16th February.

My Generation (Part 2) will air on Newstalk at 7am on Saturday 22nd February and will be repeated at 6pm on Sunday 23rd February.

My Generation was produced, recorded and Eeited by Francesca Lalor. Additional recording by Emma Cawley and Ray Beggan. Mixed by John Davis.

The project was supported by a grant from the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, as part of the Sound And Vision Scheme.

For More Information Contact: Francesca Lalor, Producer of My Generation

Email: francescal@newstalk.ie