Fair City is an Irish television soap opera which has been broadcast on RTÉ One since 1989. Produced by the public service broadcaster RTE, it first aired on Monday, 18 September 1989. It has won several awards and is both the most popular and the longest running Irish drama serial.
Plots centre on the domestic and professional lives of the residents of Carrigstown, a fictional suburb of the Northside part of the city of Dublin. The area encompasses a restaurant, pub, garage, corner shop, community centre, charity shop, surgery, boxing club (Esker/Carrigstown Boxing Club) and various businesses. Originally aired as one half-hour episode per week for a limited run, the show is now broadcast year round on RTÉ One in four episodes per week, all of which air at 20:00.
Fair City is the most watched drama in Ireland, with average viewing figures of 550,000. Devised by executive producer Margaret Gleeson and series producer Paul Cusack, it has remained a significant programme in terms of RTÉ's success and audience share, and also in the history of Irish television drama, tackling many controversial and taboo issues previously unseen on Irish television, such as rape.
Setting
Fair City is set in Carrigstown, a fictional suburb of the Northside part of the city of Dublin. "Carrick" is found in many real Irish locations (for instance: Carrickmacross, Carrickfergus, Carrick-on-Shannon, Carrick-on-Suir), and is derived from the Irish-language word carraig, meaning "rock". Many of the scenes take place around the main street in Carrigstown, with notable landmarks on the street including McCoy's pub, Phelan's corner shop (now Spar, formerly Doyle's), The Hungry Pig (formerly The Bistro), the Community Centre (formerly The Haven) and Vino's (formerly Rainbows Sandwich Bar). Other recurring settings include the Acorn Cabs dispatch centre, the shared office, the Helping Hand charity shop, the surgery and most recently the Peggy Tea coffee shop.
According to the RTÉ Guide, Carrigstown is bounded by Drumcondra to the north, the city centre to the south, East Wall to the east and Phibsboro to the west. Carrigstown takes its name from the village that grew up around the quarries in which granite was mined until the early 20th century – carraig, as noted above, being the Irish-language word for "rock".
Fair City occasionally makes use of real Dublin locations, such as Grafton Street, the Natural History Museum and Dublin Zoo. In 2011, filming took place for the first time outside of Dublin at the National Ploughing Championships. For the 1989 Dublin City Marathon, actors filmed short scenes taking part in the marathon that were edited into the programme in the following episode.
Characters
The series was originally focused on four families: the O'Hanlons, the Kellys, the Clarkes and the Doyles. Some of the earlier characters also included Lily Corcoran, her womanising nephew, Jack Flynn, Paul Brennan, now a billionaire, at the time worked for Jack Flynn, and Linda O'Malley, an acquaintance of Jack's, to whom he had promised fame as a singer.
During the 1990s, the Phelan, Doyle, and Molloy families were introduced and dominated storylines for that decade. Bela and Rita Doyle, along with their brood of six children and Rita's mother Hannah, were involved in many stories. The Phelan family originally consisted of Hughie and Natalie, but later a new branch of the family arrived including Hughie's mother Eunice, and his brother Christy, along with Christy's wife Renee, and their two children Floyd and Farrah. The Molloy family was introduced in the mid-1990s and consisted of patriarch Harry, his wife Dolores, and their two teenage children Wayne and Lorraine.
The Halpin family was gradually introduced in the early 2000s, starting with Damien Halpin, his mother Tess Halpin and younger siblings Laura and Mark. Since then, the show's focus has shifted to individual characters instead of family groupings. Notable characters introduced subsequently include Carol Meehan, Tracey Kavanagh, Ray O'Connell, and Jo Fahey.
