Tolka Row

Tolka Row was the first "soap" put out by RTE, the Irish Tv station in the 1960s. Like Coronation Street, it was about a working class community and was set in North Dublin. The Tolka is a small river that runs in the area. It had an early acting role for the well known actress Brenda Fricker. It was written by Maura Laverty, who was a journalist and novelist. She wrote plays about working class Dublin and the serial grew out of the plays. She sympathised with the poor and was a very talented writer. I can remember it from childhood... but a few years later, RTE moved on to a rural "soap", called The Riordans. Tolka Row only ran for a few years, but the Riordans was more long lasting. I think the tapes of it have vanished as the station did not keep them, and often taped over them. I have also been reading Laverty's plays which were set in working class Dublin. Maura was a cookery writer as well, and in her research for her cookery books, she found more and more evidence of the terrible poverty of many Dublin people. She joined a left wing political party, Clann na Poblachta, which had some success in the 1940s and 50s...and campaigned for working class Dublin people to have better housing, food and medical care. One of her early plays is about a family that live in a Dublin slum. The mother tries to look after her small daughter Chrissie and her sister's illegitmate child Kevin.. but her older son Lar is a gambler and they are desperately poor. There are new houses and flats being built by the Government but there are not enough of them. Chrissie loves her little cousin Kevin, and tries to give him little treats, though her family dont have enough money for essentials. Other relatives refuse to take him into their homes as he is an illegitimate child. One of the nuns who supply the family with a meal a day, gives Chrissie a loan of a can to carry back her food to the family but she sells the can to get a little money to buy Kevin some chocolate. She sells it to a nasty woman who begs for a living and drinks. Then, the money she has got to buy the chocolate is stolen. Eventually, Chrissie confesses to her nun what she did, and the nun forgives her. She tells her she will give her a job doling out the food, when she is old enough to work. Kevin gets a place in a fairly decent orphanage...