A significant event preceded Máiréad becoming a Probation Officer, In 1978, she was crowned 'Housewife Of The Year'

If Máiréad Carmody were asked to go to Mars in the morning, you get the feeling the West Cork woman would give the proposition her full consideration, weighing up how things might pan out and, ultimately, what she’d learn from living on the Red Planet, 140 million miles from Earth and far from everyone she knows.

Máiréad has always been willing to take on challenges, try something new, and push herself. In the early 2000s, when the youngest of her and her husband John’s seven children had reached young adulthood, she decided to enrol full-time at UCC to study social work.

College was a steep learning curve, especially as she had finished formal education at the age of 16 in her hometown of Skibbereen. One of her daughters had offered to help her with assignments, particularly with navigating a PC and formatting documents, but she refused the well-intentioned offer.

Máiréad recalls telling her, “No, you won’t. Because if you do it for me, then I’ll never learn.”

Her route into the Probation Service was not unlike that of many others: after earning her BSW degree in social work, she completed a Master’s in Social Policy. During her college work placement, she worked in the Service, applied for a full-time position, and has been working ever since, mostly in Cork, in both the prisons team and the Cork Southside team. While working in Cork prison, she founded St Nicholas Trust, which offers support to people affected by imprisonment, especially the families of prisoners.

Becoming Housewife of the Year

But there’s also a significant event that preceded Máiréad becoming a Probation Officer, one that has been the subject of a major documentary this past year. In 1978, Máiréad was crowned Housewife of the Year.

The competition ran for nearly 40 years, from 1967 until 1995, and contestants, all housewives, were judged on their “cookery, nurturing, and basic household management skills.” The final was a staple of evening news broadcasts and covered by all the papers of the day, but the contest truly entered popular culture after Gay Byrne signed on as host.

Back in the late 1970s, Máiréad entered the competition on the back of her mother’s encouragement and cajoling.

“My mother was a very good cook and a very good homemaker with very few resources, but she really made the best of everything,” Máiréad recalled recently. “She said to me one time, ‘You should enter for that.’”

Máiréad dismissed the idea initially, but the following year her mother brought it up again. So, she entered the Cork round, won through to the regional final, and eventually progressed to the final at the Burlington Hotel in Dublin.

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Máiréad’s winning two-course menu cost a grand total of ￡4.20 and consisted of Carbery stuffed chicken (which she deboned) with velouté sauce, Cleire savoury rice, and Kerrygold courgettes. Dessert was Cape gooseberry surprise. It was certainly a winning meal, judging by a photo of the spread in an edition of Woman’s Way magazine from 1979, in which Máiréad was the cover star.

On being crowned Housewife of the Year, Mairead was presented with “a cheque for ￡500 and a luxury cooker”.

Máiréad recalls that for each round of the competition, she tried to improve on what she cooked. As she says, she’s the kind of person who doesn’t like resting on her laurels, so as she progressed, she upped her culinary game. But while the cooking part of the contest might be the skill most people associate with Housewife of the Year, contestants were also judged on their budgeting skills and, in some ways, their life beyond the kitchen.

Máiréad remembers that Jim Sherwin, who preceded Gay Byrne as host of the competition, spent much of their interview asking her about her role in the community in Skibbereen, where both she and her late husband John were heavily involved.

“Because we were so involved in our community, my interview was very much based on my interests. He never asked me, ‘What does your husband do? Where did you meet your husband?’ That was the question Gay Byrne asked everybody,” Máiréad said, adding that she had great time for Gay Byrne. “He raised very important issues for women.”

But those patronising lines of inquiry, where did you meet your husband, what does your husband do for a living, how did you meet your husband, feature prominently in the documentary, as much to show that women were defined both by the home and their husband. In a way, Gay Byrne was taking his cue from the Constitution, which placed women firmly in the home.

More than a housewife

Housewife of the Year was of its time, and it celebrated and reinforced a narrow definition of womanhood, motherhood, and indeed of decency and respectability.

The documentary, however, goes beyond that to tell the women’s lives in a much more rounded and fuller way.

“Respectability was really important,” Máiréad said, referring to the singular image of women the competition portrayed. However, the documentary pulls back the curtain to portray stories that competitors didn’t or couldn’t share because back then you couldn’t talk about those things.

As Fionnuala Hannigan writes in her review of Housewife of the Year in Screen Daily: “Ciarán Cassidy (the director) has found many of the original contestants, who return to the empty stage to recall their experiences—both as participants in the competition and in their lives outside it. Some of these stories are heart-breaking in their simplicity: women making do with the roles their country and the church assigned them, impossible tasks leading to generational poverty. Others aren’t dealt with in enough depth, in particular the teenager

sent off to the Magdalene workhouse after a pharmacist developed her polaroids of a teenage day out and reported her to the local priest.”

Máiréad has seen the documentary multiple times now, beginning at the premiere in Galway earlier this year, where she watched it with her four daughters and one of her sons. Máiréad was keen to glean what they took from the documentary.

“I was interested in what my children thought, because they would be completely honest. They thought it was really good. They thought there was a lot of honesty in it.”

Since then, she’s seen it in Cork, Killarney, Bantry, and Dublin, and she’s spoken at Q&As as well as to local and national media. As she joked, she’s famous now, and she’s enjoying this moment long after her participation in the competition.

She’s also had a chance to reconnect with other contestants and share in the lives and careers they’ve built and the travails they’ve overcome.

Máiréad said it’s been nice having this moment long after the moment had come and gone.

“Back in the day, we had photographs in the front of newspapers. When I look back now, I think, actually, it was very big, but at the time, I’m not sure whether I thought it was big or not. The film is like a step back into that time.”

Housewife of the Year is screening at multiple venues across Ireland now and into the New Year. There will be extra screening around Nollaig na mBan on January 6. You can check when and where Housewife of the Year is being screen via this link.