[dropcap]I[/dropcap] mean, I don’t know if you’ve spent a lot of time in Connemara, but there’s not a lot of murder and drug shipments coming in all the time,” says Owen McDonnell, star of TG4’s enticing new drama An Bronntanas. While it doesn’t quite hold a mirror up to contemporary reality in rural Ireland, McDonnell is confident that that is no stumbling block to the show’s appeal. “It’s just trying to show real people in a real situation — you know the situation is fictional but what’s important is that it’s believable, that people could exist within it.” The show, without a doubt, achieves this.

An Bronntanas follows the events that spiral out of control when JJ Magill (Dara Devaney) returns home to Connemara to take charge of the family business after his father’s death. After the discovery of a boat with a murdered woman and over €1 million worth of drugs on board during a coastguard rescue mission, Magill is unwittingly embroiled in escalating violence, and the show explores how good men can be led down murky paths by opportunity and circumstance. McDonnell portrays Fiachra Green, the inspector investigating the woman’s murder, and he doggedly tries to solve the case without regard for who among his acquaintances might be implicated.

However, Inspector Green has his own dark undertones too, and often seems to enjoy nettling other characters with his acerbic comments. McDonnell, who is best known for his role as Sergeant Jack Driscoll in RTÉ drama Single-Handed, admits that this type of television role was something of a departure for him. “I kind of tend to play the morally stand-up guy with the great moral compass, whereas this is more interesting — his moral compass is all over the place really […] Fiachra will only do the right thing if it serves his own agenda.” McDonnell explains that it was this character and his importance in the script that drew him to the project. “When you’re playing the good guy at the centre of the piece there’s a lot of story shown through your eyes […]  whereas if you are the unsympathetic character, you are driving things along, it’s more fun.”

The sequence of events unfolding in An Bronntanas decidedly fall within the burgeoning genre of Celtic Noir. But even beyond the label, from the style of the opening credits to the gritty nature of its contents, one is easily struck by the correlations to its sibling productions in Nordic Noir television. Was this a conscious influence? “Celtic Noir was never really mentioned when we were filming it,” McDonnell says, “but I think what shows like The Bridge and The Killing have shown is that you don’t have to shoot something in English for it to appeal to a broad audience; if the quality of the show is good enough, people will tune in. So I think in that respect they inspired the ambition of the project and they kind of showed the way.” McDonnell also points out that An Bronntanas still does stand apart from other shows. “I think it differs from them in that there’s a lot of humour in An Bronntanas as well — it could go down the line of being very stony-faced but yeah there’s a lot of humour.” It certainly has a more tongue-in-cheek approach than its Scandinavian counterparts — it’s hard to imagine The Killing showing a dismemberment scene with Rod Stewart’s cover of First Cut is the Deepest playing in the background. But whether or not An Bronntanas may appeal to a broader international audience as a result remains to be seen, as the show has also been edited into a film and submitted as Ireland’s entry in the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar category.

McDonnell’s point about linguistic inspirations raises the question of the importance of language, particularly one that relatively few people are fluent in, in our enjoyment of television shows and whether a story can appeal to us regardless of what language carries it. More directly related to Irish, An Bronntanas perhaps is also important for showing the quality of drama that can be achieved as Gaeilge. The show is bilingual but with a dominant emphasis on Irish, and McDonnell feels that this lends it greater authenticity, and furthermore it makes the language accessible: “It’s not trying to force Irish down people’s throats. I like the idea that if you create a product, whether it’s a television series or a music programme, that is worth watching, that will attract people towards the language.” As the standard knowledge of Irish television may not extend much beyond Ros na Rún or Aifric, An Bronntanas is hopefully marking the upward trend of similar projects that reinforce Irish as a viable language for drama.

Even taking away the language element and considering Irish television productions more generally, is An Bronntanas another step towards more ambitious projects? There has arguably been a stagnation in Irish television for a long time, where the only consistently watchable shows have been the likes of The Late Late Toy Show. Of course, one can’t discount funding as being a factor behind why we haven’t kept up with our British and American competitors. But with the advent of shows like An Bronntanas and Love/Hate, which has just finished its fifth season, one wonders whether the so-called Golden Age of Television may at last be finding its way here. McDonnell doesn’t think we should hold ourselves back. “There’s no reason why we can’t make television to rival television from around the world. I just finished another project called Klondike about the gold rush in Yukon in the 1890s […] we tried to make a quite gritty dirty western, and why not? You know, we shouldn’t feel in any way inferior to anybody else.”

The finale of An Bronntanas will air on November 20 at 9:30pm on TG4.