New RTÉ series Back to Barrytown for Sunday nights from 16 May

Back to Barrytown celebrates The Commitments, The Snapper and The Van – 30 years on 

Three part documentary for Sunday nights from 16 May tells the story of Roddy Doyle’s much-loved Barrytown trilogy and meets the cast and crew from the films 

It’s been 30 years since the world was introduced to the Dublin suburb of Barrytown. The film version of The Commitments became a global phenomenon, not only because of the music, but because of the connection it made with people who’d never even heard of the Northside, let alone Barrytown. This fictional suburb and its characters were a microcosm – not only of Dublin or Ireland at that time, but of ordinary lives: their dreams and ambitions, their triumphs and failures – all of it documented in Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy: The Commitments, The Snapper, and The Van.

Now, three decades on, the actor Colm Meaney – who featured across the trilogy of films – explores the world of Barrytown: the people who populated it, the real lives that inspired it, and those who helped create it. He peers through this fictional window into a brief moment in the history of modern Ireland: a time when the fortunes of the country and its citizens were changing utterly.

Back to Barrytown is a series of three documentaries that will focus on the stories, themes and characters of each of the three books, capturing the fanciful daydreams of escape and prosperity, and the down to earth realities of family, friendship and community.

The series will feature many of the well-known and some of the not so well-known cast and crew from the film trilogy including: Roddy Doyle, Colm Meaney, Brendan O’Carroll, Angeline Ball, Robert Arkins, Ruth Mc Cabe, Mark Geraghty, Stephen Frears, John and Ros Hubbard, and many more.

And to get viewers at home re-living and revelling in those heady 90s days, RTÉ One will air the movies The Commitments on Saturday 22 May (following the Eurovision final) and The Snapper on Saturday 29 May at 9.30pm.