RTE One’s €6million drama Rebellion started well but has since divebombed into unintentional hilarity.

Aside from the wild historical inaccuracies on events, costumes and dialogue, the trudgingly-paced recreation of the fighting in Dublin has the production values of a Crimeline reconstruction.

There is no sense of a massive rebellion taking place as the soulless and dumb fictional lead characters wander with ease around the besieged capital.

Brian Gleeson’s character seems so fed up with the whole thing at least twice in the last two episodes he appears to give up, leg it out of a gunfight and stroll back unscathed to the GPO.

The HQ of the Rising is run by Padraig Pearse, portrayed as a sexist Hannibal Lecter. If you were to use only this drama as a guide, Pearse, a perennial hero of the revolution, stands around for days in a spotless uniform saying the rosary and not firing a shot.

He’s accompanied by a parody James Connolly, played by Rab C Nesbitt. Michael Collins shows up sporting a stage-Cork accent for two seconds and then vanishes.

The three fictional women who make up the central figures of Rebellion are so pathetic, most of us are just praying for a stray bullet to take them out of our misery and spark the sleepy series into action.

In the most dramatic scene so far, Liza, who was supposed to be tending to the injured, is inexplicably walking around a war-torn street on her own when she yells at a boy to be careful.

Her caution makes the child, again inexplicably, stand on the street saying nothing for such a long time that he is shot by a British soldier.

The shooter appeared to be aided by Liza’s fiance army officer — but it’s not clear if it’s him, or if it is, why he doesn’t recognise his own fiancee.

None of it makes sense.

Much like her character Siobhan in Love/Hate, when Charlie Murphy’s tiresome Liza isn’t crying, she’s on the verge of tears and her demeanour hasn’t much changed since the fighting actually started.

Her greatest achievement in the series so far is to endure four days as a nurse attending to bullet-riddled victims without getting a speck of blood on her wedding dress. She even tends to the injured on the street without any medical supplies or even a bandage to her credit.

Her would-be lover Gleeson must be secretly shaving or has a problem growing facial hair.

The makers of the series obviously discovered after filming that there is very little rebellion going on in Rebellion so background gunfire sound effects are ramped up endlessly.

During the City Hall siege, we can hear bullets zipping by, explosions and glass smashing, yet the building appears to be entirely undamaged and there’s no sign of any broken glass or even smoke.

It’s the cleanest rising in history and everyone, from soldiers to tenement-dwellers raiding shops, would effortlessly pass the Daz doorstep challenge.

In another groan-inducing scene, a looter in a pristine three-piece suit is shot against a ketchup-splattered wall by a dozen soldiers — yet still somehow survives to allow us to establish the meanness of an officer who finishes him off with two shots to the head.

Gleeson’s outraged British soldier brother decides to have a break and he is able to stroll nonchalantly through the Rising to have a lie-down with his missus in the tenements.

Despite having some of the worst slums in Europe, the Dublin tenements actually look cosy here and the Mahon family have a huge apartment to themselves, like one of those fancy lofts in Manhattan.

Joe Duffy, who wrote meticulously about the appalling conditions of families in Dublin in 1916, must have been throwing his book at the screen.

Rebellion’s writer Colin Teevan would have done well to have read Duffy’s Children of the Rising. Or as Gerry Adams suggested on Twitter, the works of Pearse, after the character in this series delivers an unlikely sexist put-down to fictional volunteer Frances O’Flaherty. Now there’s a name for the Yank viewers if ever there was one.

The fourth day of the 1916 Rising is so apparently low-key that the mindlessly stupid Frances pops home for a tea break in which she hilariously stuffs her face with pears and buns like a pirate returning from months at sea.

The dialogue is so bad at times it feels like a first-class primary school play on Irish history. “Why are they doing it?” “To Free Ireland”. “From what?” “British Rule”. Duh. Teevan’s Rising-for-Dummies script feels like it only cares about the American audience it hopes to sell the rights to. If this is the only portrayal of the Rising fed to US audiences they’ll think about 12 people were involved and hardly a building was damaged in the first five days.

Rebellion is a catastrophically dull and empty portrayal of a very dramatic week and with over a million euro per episode it should have done better. The portrayal of an event so well-known to an Irish audience would surely have been better with an Irish director, with respect to the Finnish Aku Louhimies.

With only two episodes to go, there isn’t much hope for Rebellion and Sunday night viewers would be best advised to switch over to BBC’s War and Peace to see how the grown-ups do it.

A better way to tackle housing



MY Homeless Family, the TV series showing people living in hotels after losing their homes, has put the issue back into focus.

Anyone shocked by the images of life in emergency accommodation has not been reading much news in the past year.

Brendan Howlin, the Minister for Smuggery, said homelessness would be a priority for the next Government.

That’s pretty much an admission that they didn’t care this time around, while blaming tight budgets for not being able to help homeless families.

Brendan and his Fine Gael masters approved the writing-off of hundreds of millions from fatcat loans through State machinery like NAMA and IBRC, squandered €80million on consultants’ fees for Irish Water and wasted tens of millions of euro to run quangos they promised to close down five years ago.

The entire welfare system in Ireland needs serious revision. We live in a country where people can milk benefits and live far too well off the State without wanting to work, while others are sleeping on streets or in cars to get by.

There are 75 charities in Ireland which claim to support homelessness in Ireland. In a country this size do we really need this many?

I reckon up to 1,000 people are employed by housing charities for around 4,000 homeless folk.

Surely the cost of admin, wages, rental and running 75 agencies would be reduced if they amalgamated into one.

Kenny apples



DRINK was back on the agenda this week as pubs fight to end the Good Friday ban and health groups promote Dry January.

It’s the usual battle of good versus evil spirits and I’m on the side of the booze. Alcohol is a wonderful creation, gifted to us by monks and, by extension, God.

Just like money, drink can become a bad thing in the hands of a bad person.

However, 90 per cent of us have enhanced our lives and nights out with the demon drink and long may it continue without nanny interference.

The Good Friday ban is a curiosity I’ve enjoyed for years just for the sheer annual shock of seeing black sheets pulled across aisles of drink in the supermarket. Or the enjoyable stillness it imposes on the night-time streets of Dublin and other towns once a year.

It doesn’t affect many of us one way or the other but it does bewilder and enrage tourists. If simple business isn’t sufficient reason to repeal the ban, then the fact that it was imposed by a near-totalitarian Catholic Church in a blacker period, should.

To further reason about the morality of alcohol, consider history’s most famous drinkers and non-drinkers.

Adolf Hitler was an avowed teetotaller and he managed to become the most evil leader of the 20th Century stone cold sober.

One wonders what would have become of Europe had he gone on a massive tear?

In contrast, the hero of World War Two was one Winston Churchill, an outrageous alcoholic, who was frequently drunk on brandy while giving orders to his generals towards victory.

Furthermore, the terrorist group Islamic State are a bunch of anti-booze campaigners and they have not done the world any good.

So the next time you’re in a debate with a teetotaller, you can literally tell them they’re acting like Hitler and IS. Have a gin and tonic on Good Friday and we’ll be grand.