TV review: The best thing about 'Scannal' is it’s only 30 minutes long

Waves crash over Ireland's Eye. Picture: Colin Keegan, Collins Dublin

RTÉ is very good at some things. Telling a story is one of them.

And the story on this week's Scannal (RTÉ One and RTÉ Player) is a cracker.

At first it seems like a straightforward murder mystery. Twenty-eight-year-old Maria Kirwan is found dead on Ireland’s Eye, an island off Howth, Co Dublin, in 1852. A medical student is rushed into making an examination of her body, and he concludes it was accidental death by drowning.

The locals aren’t having it. They are convinced that Maria’s husband, William Kirwan, killed her. Sure hadn’t the landlady in their B&B heard them arguing? And the ferrymen, hired to take the couple from Howth to the (almost deserted) island that day were suspicious when Kirwan told them he had been separated from his wife during a shower and now she was missing.

Then, the mic drop moment. We’re told Kirwan had a second family, seven kids with another woman called Teresa Kenny. Dublin was scandalised.

The Kirwans were stalwarts of middle-class society, living on Merrion St, where he made a good living as an artist.

His double-life sealed the widely-held notion that he was a bad ’un, described by others as an arrogant snob. (The best detail is that he didn’t pay the ferrymen or women who tended Maria’s body in Howth.) He was arrested, found guilty, sentenced to hang, but the sentence was commuted to 27 years in prison after a campaign protesting his innocence. In fairness the evidence didn’t stretch far beyond ‘William Kirwan is a bad ’un, of course he murdered his wife.’ Anyway, I think he did it and so will you.

The best thing about Scannal is it’s only 30 minutes long. So there isn’t loads of time for talking-heads to talk their heads off about what all this means.

It’s perfectly paced here with a blend of re-enactment, commentators and low-key narration by Sinéad Ní Churnáin that matches the moody subject matter. I particularly liked the guy who brings people on tours of Ireland’s Eye, confidently pointing out where Maria was pushed off the cliff by her husband, even though the medical evidence suggested she hadn’t suffered a fall.

The truth hardly matters any more. But this show gives a pleasing glimpse of life and morality in 19th century Ireland, right down to a destitute Teresa Kenny having to move to America with her seven kids after Kirwan went to jail. Give it a watch.