A glimpse of life inside the Big House

Patrick Cooney spent a decade “dropping in and out” of the lives of four members of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy for his documentary, The Raj in the Rain, which will be screened on Sunday during the Kinsale Arts Festival.

There are many charming moments in it, among them Olivia Durdin-Robertson’s description of the eclipse of her class. Apparently, there are less than 30 families in Ireland who occupy their original estates.

“They were living in this dream world,” she says. “It was all described by Elizabeth Bowen, a marvellous lady, but it was terribly dismal because they were all has-beens. I remember getting to this house — a Georgian palace, with all the old cabins around it — and they’d be playing these records, rather cracked, of Noel Coward, but why not? When you’re dead you can create a sort of bubble for yourself of some world in which there are French windows and ‘who’s for tennis?’.”