Crá review: Quality noir thriller puts both Donegal and the Irish language to beautiful use

We live in an age of surprises, some more welcome than others. One of the happier bolts from the blue has been the championing of the Irish language in popular culture. Whether it’s Belfast hip-hop trio Kneecap rapping as Gaeilge or forthcoming folk-horror film Fréamhacha (roots) promising to scare the Leanbh Íosa out of us next year, all of a sudden Irish is in vogue. Who could have guessed the best way to revitalise the language would be to put it in content we wanted to consume rather than figuratively (sometimes literally) beating the young people of Ireland around the head with a dog-eared copy of Peig?
Latest aboard what is starting to resemble a bandwagon is Crá (TG4, Monday), a noir-ish thriller set in the Donegal badlands and co-produced by TG4 and BBC Northern Ireland. Tellingly, the dead hand of RTÉ is nowhere near it. Consequently, it suffers from neither the lack of ambition nor the cack-handed storytelling that is too often a feature of drama creaking out of Montrose.
Crá – which, according to TG4, means “anguish” or “torment” – takes a while to get going, and it is clear that for some of the cast Irish is not a first (or possibly a second) language. But Donegal – Ireland’s very own Middle Earth in the rain – is the perfect backdrop for a thriller about a garda whose life is turned upside-down when a body found in a bog turns out to be that of his own mother, a society beauty and blow-in from Germany who vanished 15 years previously.
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The personal connection means Garda Conall Ó Súilleabháin (a moody Dónall Ó Héalai – who has a clean sweep of Irish language roles following the films Arracht and Foscadh) is officially prohibited from looking into the case. Instead, he teams up with annoying podcaster Ciara-Kate (Hannah Brady), who is making an audio drama about the case that will hopefully be titled Only Murders in the Parish. Young Offenders’s Alex Murphy plays Conall’s geeky underling.
Donegal is utilised wonderfully in the script by Doireann Ní Chorragáin and Richie Conroy. The flat, ominous countryside looks like Tolkien’s Mordor as brought to you by Fáilte Ireland. The Irish is quite understandable, too, even if you aren’t fluent – though maybe that was just my Cork ears pricking up at Murphy’s Munster dialect.
Crá doesn’t lack for cliches, it has to be said. You will be shocked to hear the fictional townland of Carrickanaul has secrets, that the victim was not quite as wholesome as she portrayed herself and that Conall’s crotchety business bigwig dad had secrets of his own. But it’s put together with genuine verve, and the fact they’re speaking Irish allows us to briefly indulge in the fantasy that we’re just another northern European nation whose native tongue is in everyday use.
That’s a wonderful fiction, and if shows of the quality of Crá continue to get made, it might even one day become reality.