A decade ago RTÉ followed some of the 40,000 people who left for the US. Now it has gone back for an update, reports Róisín Ingle
Almost 10 years on people still remember the conflict on the couch. Thousands of miles from home, Aideen and Shahram Emdadian appeared on RTÉ television to talk about the changes in their lives five months after leaving Dublin for the US on a Morrison visa.
He was desperately unhappy with the way things had turned out for his wife and two young daughters in the Bay Area of San Francisco and wanted to return home to Tallaght in Dublin. She was determined that the family should give life in the US a chance.
And so a nation not yet jaded by wall-to-wall reality television watched enthralled as husband and wife argued it out on the sofa, the air-conditioned gulf between them seeming to stretch wider than the Grand Canyon.
The Morrison Tapes, which was filmed in 1994 and broadcast the following year, tracked four groups of people who had taken up Morrison visas, which in the early 1990s allowed tens of thousands of Irish people to work in the US. Their stories made riveting viewing, bringing us water-cooler television before we really knew what the phrase meant.
Anyone who saw the series couldn’t help but wonder what happened next. Did they succeed or fail, stay or come home, stay together or drift apart? As a result The Morrison Tapes: Ten Years Later, a series of updates on three of the four groups, is expected to attract a curious and sizeable audience when the first program goes out on RTÉ 1 on Tuesday.
