Dealing with Devlin

Lelia Doolan tells Pádraic Killeen how her remarkable documentary on Bernadette Devlin McAliskey has lessons for today’s protest movements.

FOR more than 50 years Lelia Doolan has enjoyed a varied and distinguished career at the coalface of Irish cultural life. Most notably, perhaps, she was a pivotal member of a group of young, innovative, and socially conscious broadcasters who nurtured RTÉ in its tender years in the mid 1960s. Among other things, Doolan produced the celebrated current affairs programme 7 Days and the provocative soap opera The Riordans. In 1969, however, she departed RTÉ with Bob Quinn and Jack Dowling in protest at the station’s growing bureaucracy and cultural conservatism.

In later years, Doolan served as artistic director of the Abbey Theatre and as chair of the Irish Film Board. She has also been a film producer, a lecturer, and was one of the founders of the Galway Film Fleadh.