It embodied the changing Ireland of its period. When it was first broadcast, the reforming Seán Lemass was Taoiseach. When it finished, his son-in-law - the controversial Charles Haughey - was months from becoming Taoiseach. The Riordans covered a period of rapid transition in Irish life, from an agrarian, protectionist Ireland of the early 1960s to membership of the European Economic Community and so a rapidly changing rural economy in the 1970s. In the 1960s, Ireland was still rural, conservative and Catholic, with storylines like a character going on the Pill containing a shock value unthinkable a decade later. By the late 1970s, Ireland was becoming less rural, less conservative and less Catholic. Ironically, one of the biggest shock issues of the early show, the use of contraception, became less of a shock when in 1979 the provision of contraception was legalised, albeit with tight controls, in the very year the show was taken off air. The changing nature of Irish society was shown in the soap operas that replaced The Riordans. After the short interregnum Bracken, came Glenroe, another 'rural' show set, unlike The Riordans, on the fringes of a town close to Dublin, with some characters living in an urban housing estate. Even the central characters, a farmer and his father Miley Byrne and Dinny Byrne, blurred the urban and rural worlds in a way that Tom Riordan never did, by turning their farm into an open farm for urban people to visit, and selling their produce in their own shop in the local town. After two decades that show itself was axed, leaving RTÉ with only one major homegrown soap opera, one that has no rural aspect at all, and is set in inner-city Dublin, Fair City. Missing episodes A controversial policy that was in force for the network in the 1960s and 1970s led to the erasing of previous episodes, so that the expensive video that had been used to record them could be reused. As a result, little remains of RTÉ's 1960s output, with shows like The Riordans, The Late Late Show and others routinely wiped after broadcast. Later careers of the actors Some of the actors had distinguished careers after the axing of The Riordans. After Bracken Gabriel Byrne went to the United States where he became a successful film actor. Tony Doyle, Father Sheehy, who had left the series in the mid-1970s, became