From Barrytown to Ballymun: The Problematics of Space, Class and Gender in Roddy Doyle's Family (1994)

Family constituted a self-conscious departure from Roddy Doyle’s earlier ‘Barrytown ’novel trilogy, and especially their film adaptations, which offered a sympathetic but more sentimentalised and romanticised account of working class Dublin life. The series proceeded to offer a sensitive, if limited analysis of the constructions and articulations of urban space, class and gender in modern Ireland,offering a rare exception to the historical absence of an urban social realist tradition in Irish film and television drama.