TV review: Craftspeople of West Cork pose tricky questions in Masters: Keepers of the Tradition

Stonemason Julia Gebel, RTE Show Masters: Keepers of the Tradition

Masters: Keepers of the Tradition (RTÈ One and RTÈ Player) weaves in a few plot lines. Episode one of six about local craftspeople, it’s the story of Julia Gebel, a German stonemason who fell for Ireland after working on the restoration of Cormac’s Chapel at the Rock of Cashel.

It’s also about Dick Barrett, a teacher from West Cork and member of the IRA during the War of Independence, who was executed in Mountjoy by Free State forces as a reprisal killing during the Civil War. It’s about a lump of 350 million-year-old stone carved out of a quarry in Kilkenny. And in the end it makes you wonder if killing is ever justified.

The modern day action takes place over 22 days, as Gebel works on a bust of Barrett at her workshop near Ovens, outside Cork. This is eye candy TV as she first makes a bust of him from an old photo, shows it to his relatives so they’re happy with it, then makes a mould of that bust which she fills with plaster and finally chisels a copy of this mould using a hunk of ancient stone from Kilkenny.

Gebel wants to capture Barrett as a person as well as a revolutionary, so she focuses on his smirk as the cornerstone to his personality. A smirk can go either way. It can be warm and confident or cocky and unlikeable. It’s tricky enough to get it right with pencil and paper, let alone chisel on stone. Gebel manages it and then some, so Dick Barrett in stone ends up looking ‘sound’, the single best thing you can be in Ireland.

This process is beautifully shot and directed by film-maker Barry Donnellan, capturing the Zen tranquillity of a master craftswoman at work, with Mary McEvoy’s reassuring narrator voice in the background. And then a mic-drop moment. The completed bust is transported to Barrett’s home-town of Enniskean, and unveiled by then Tánaiste, Micheál Martin.

Up to this point we were told Barrett died by unlawful execution, but Martin ups the ante and says it was murder. At one level, this is Micheál Martin being the leader of Fianna Fáil, the party that emerged out of Barrett’s side of the Civil War. But I think he did something else too, giving us a timely reminder there is enough horror in war without adding to it.

Dick Barrett’s memorial in West Cork is more than a handsome work of art. It raises a tricky question too — is it ever worth killing anyone for anything?

Give this handsome piece of telly a watch and make up your own mind.