real-life wife of John Cowley, Tom Riordan, the lead middle aged character. The striking difference in ages of the couple (she was his senior by twenty years, and as Minnie Brennan was made to look even older through make-up) became a source of comment among viewers, as some noted in letters to the show that she was old enough on screen to convincingly play his mother. Local actors included Peter Greene, who played a young boy always in trouble. Many other locals were cast during the many seasons. Pushing agendas Irish broadcasting in the 1960s and 1970s reflected the clash of ideas between elements of traditional rural Catholic society and new liberal ideas coming from the United States, Britain and Catholicism itself through the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Conservatives within RTÉ associated with the Knights of Columbanus clashed with liberals and with Marxists associated with Official Sinn Féin, over the content of programmes, through the extent to which the ultimate liberal victory was a product of one side infiltrating the station more successfully than the other is disputed, with one academic saying that the liberal win represented only the triumph of the 'liberal consensus'. However, then-leading OSF intellectual Eoghan Harris suggests that left-wing radicalism was of crucial importance in shaping RTÉ's output in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The Riordans tackled many 'conservative versus liberal' issues from its very start. Its start coincided with the coming into force of the Succession Act which for the first time granted to the wife of a farmer an automatic right of succession to the family farm, so removing the danger that after her husband's death she could be left with nothing, with the property being willed to a total stranger. The issue was at the time controversial; banks until the 1970s would not allow a wife to open a bank account except with the approval of her husband. Conservatives suggested that the new Act, which had been pushed through in the face of opposition by then Minister for Justice Charles Haughey, would undermine the traditional family and lead to the sale of a farm owned by a family, were a farmer's marriage to break up. Liberals argued that the reform was one of social justice and a long-overdue recognition of the rights of farmers' wives. In the words of academic Dr Finola Kennedy, The Riordans "introduced one of the most sensitive