From That Small Island Interview: Prof Bríona Nic Dhiarmada and Prof Jane Ohlmeyer on Trinity’s Impact on the Documentary Series Exploring 10,000 Years of Irish History

Prof. Nic Dhiarmada, who is a graduate of Trinity, is Thomas J. and Kathleen M. O'Donnell Professor Emerita of Irish Studies and Concurrent Professor of Film, Television, and Theatre, at the University of Notre Dame in the United States. Prof. Ohlmeyer is Erasmus Smith’s Professor of Modern History, in Trinity College Dublin, as well as a Trinity graduate herself. Below, they discuss how important the university was for facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration and creativity, the importance of location throughout production, and the series’ impact on the Arts and Humanities.

1916 and Beyond

The initial idea for From That Small Island was sparked during a conference in Brazil in 2016, when Nic Dhiarmada and Ohlmeyer met for the first time. Nic Dhiarmada was presenting her previous COCO documentary series 1916: The Irish Rebellion, which examines the Easter Rising in Dublin 100 years on. While people were assuming Nic Dhiarmada would now do “the trilogy,” with subsequent documentaries on the War of Independence and the Civil War, she wanted to broaden the horizon. “I wanted to look at Ireland through a different lens. I wanted to pull back the camera, which we were looking at 1916 with, to see how will the questions change? How will the answers change?”
Ohlmeyer, meanwhile, was working on a monograph entitled Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism, & The Early Modern World, which explores the imperial processes shaping early-modern Ireland and Irish contributions to the formation of global empires. It was published in 2023 by Oxford University Press.

Talking about their meeting in 2016, Ohlmeyer says, “Bríona was thinking of doing a big ambitious project that tells the story of Ireland in a global context. I said, mine is much more modest, I’m just focusing on the early modern period. But, actually, the two very much thematically complemented each other.”

“When Jane said hers was more modest it wasn’t at all,” Nic Dhiarmada laughs. “It was more time constrained, maybe!” Both of them recognised they were looking at Ireland with a global perspective, something which is evident in From That Small Island: “One minute you’re talking about the British Empire in the Barbados, and then you’re talking about Ricardo Wall, the Spanish Atlantic Empire,” Ohlmeyer observes. “Then we’re talking about Antoine Walsh and The French Atlantic Empire. The Irish are just global from really the early decades of the 17th century. So Bríona was thinking, why not take that idea back in time and look at how the world shaped Ireland, as well as how Ireland shaped the world.”
Together, then, they had the opportunity to explore Ireland on a global scale and over the course of 10,000 years: something which, Nic Dihiarmada notes, has never been done before. “Most historians either go from 1800 up to the present day, or from the coming of Christianity up to the present if they’re feeling brave.”

Trinity Long Room Hub

Such an ambitious project, both in terms of scope and depth of research, would of course require a wealth of knowledge across numerous disciplines and somewhere to facilitate a major knowledge exchange. The Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Institute, of which Ohlmeyer was the director at the time, became instrumental in From That Small Island’s foundational research. The series’ senior academic researcher was Dr Caoimhe Whelan, who was based in the Hub and funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs. The Hub was also the location of many of the project’s first meetings and enabled them to establish a key relationship with the Department of Foreign Affairs, one that continued throughout the production.
From the very start, From That Small Island was also a highly interdisciplinary work, drawing very heavily on the Arts and Humanities, especially the disciplines of History, Archaeology, and Art History, and combining them with the Sciences of Genetics and Osteoarchaeology. Across the four episodes, eight Trinity academics feature as talking head experts, and many more worked behind the scenes.

Trinity was a supportive atmosphere as there were many pre-existing associations between colleagues ready to call on. “I’ve known Dan Bradley, the Professor of Population Genetics at Trinity, forever,” Ohlmeyer explains. “And it became very clear very early on that Bríona needed to talk to Dan. The Hub allows for those sorts of connections to be made. And then Dan introduced us to Eileen Murphy, who is Professor from the School of Natural and Built Environment at Queen's University Belfast, who’s another very important player in episode one.”

“I was in Irish Studies, which is interdisciplinary by its nature.” Nic Dhiarmada adds. “And of course I did study Old Irish in Trinity under the late, great, wonderful scholar, Ernest Gordon Quinn. So I had that background kind of stuck to me, I think.” As well as a filmmaker, Nic Dhiarmada was a professor in film, television and theatre and as a result is always operating in interdisciplinary roles.

Ohlmeyer points out that the Hub promotes not only talking across disciplines, but learning how to work as part of a team. “I think that isn't something that comes easily to Arts and Humanities researchers, but certainly to my mind it’s something to be encouraged. If you really want to embark on big projects like this, you have to learn to make concessions, to compromise. It’s not about you, it’s about the greater good of the project. And that’s something I think we as academics need to learn.”

The Production

The filming itself took place over two years. Green screen interviews were held at the studio in RTÉ, where they interviewed people, including a background associated with them. Ohlmeyer’s background throughout the episodes, for example, is that of the Trinity Long Room Hub. These segments are interspersed with location sections, as they wanted to evoke the spirit of certain important places connected with research and learning.

In all, there were also 17 international shooting locations. Nic Dhiarmada’s busy schedule meant she visited almost all of them to meet with researchers and conduct interviews: indeed, Ohlmeyer dubs her the queen of travel! Ohlmeyer herself worked on location in India and Barbados (pictured, left; image credit COCO Content), which Nic Dhiarmada describes as her own highlight: “Jane is an old India head. She spends as much time in India teaching and lecturing as she does almost at home. And she’s got lots of friends and of course colleagues and contacts there.”

Filming on location was hugely important to the series. “When you’re in a place where something happened, it creates a different energy,” Nic Dhiarmada explains. But it also brings extra challenges. Several seconds of the final product can take hours of filming: “You’re moving around all the time, you’re doing the same shot again and again,” Ohlmeyer points out.

Nic Dhiarmada is full of praise for Ohlmeyer’s work on location: “I was able to sit when I did all the interviews, but Jane was out in the sugar plantation in 45 degree heat and the humidity must have been 100%. And she was told what it was like for indentured servants in Barbados. She wasn’t cutting the sugar cane, but she was feeling the heat and the way she narrated it was incredible because you could tell she were visibly moved. She was saying ‘this is hard, it’s humid, it’s awful.’ Imagine, hundreds and hundreds, in fact thousands, of Irish women and children, never mind the men, were working in those conditions beside enslaved Africans. And I think being on location in those places really brought it to life.”

Ohlmeyer describes it as “a combination of really intense hard work and great fun,” getting to explore New Delhi and even meeting with snake charmers. There was a high degree of professionalism from the whole crew, which included a cinematographer, a cameraman, sound people, and two directors, Rachael Moriarty and Peter Murphy, who took it in turns to visit locations throughout the production.

The editing process which followed took another year and a half: a time in which Nic Dhiarmada was working with the directors on the edit almost every day. They ended up with about 100 hours of footage which somehow had to be cut down into four one-hour episodes. An even bigger challenge was to reduce that four hours of footage down to a 90-minute feature covering the same historical time-frame!

Trinity, RTÉ and the Diaspora

Almost a decade’s work was presented to a packed hall in Trinity College Dublin on June 6th, 2025 (From That Small Island team, pictured right; image credit Trinity Long Room Hub). The university was once again central to the story of From That Small Island, with a 90-minute edit of the series shown to an international audience including the invited British, Swiss, Barbadian and Argentinian ambassadors, whose offices were collaborators on the series, along with Ceann Comhairle Verona Murphy, many Trinity colleagues and graduates, and representatives from the Department of Foreign Affairs and COCO Content.

Introducing the evening, Vice-Provost Prof. Orla Shields noted that the aims of From That Small Island “really resonate with the university’s new strategic plan,” which stresses the importance of place: “our place in Trinity, our place in Ireland, and our place as Trinity people in the world.” She also thanked Trinity’s libraries and collections for opening their doors to the researchers and producers of the series.

This launch preceded the broadcast of the series on RTÉ on Sunday the 8th of June, and the following three Sundays throughout the month. This will be followed by worldwide distribution as SBS, a public service broadcaster in Australia, and PBS in the United States are both planning coast-to-coast coverage, ensuring From That Small Island will certainly reach some of the many Irish diasporas represented in the series.

From That Small Island Will Return In....

From That Small Island’s journey is far from over as Ohlmeyer and Nic Dhiarmada are writing a companion book to the series, due in August 2026. By following the structure of the series, they will be able to explore themes and concepts from the documentary in further detail. Just as in the television programme, quotations from poetry and texts of the time will be incorporated into the writing. It will also be very heavily illustrated with footage and images from the documentary.
And while this will be a popular history book, accessible to anyone who watched the documentary series and wants to know more, it will also go through the same rigorous peer review all academic books do. “Oxford treats From That Small Island as a regular book,” Nic Dhiarmada notes. “So in other words, it is a coffee table book but it’s also a rigorously reviewed copy table book.”

From talking with them both, it’s clear that From That Small Island’s ongoing success is due in large part to the strong working relationships and mutual admiration and respect Ohlmeyer and Nic Dhiarmaida have for each other and the many collaborators on the project.

“I’ve learned a huge amount from working with Bríona and the production team,” reflects Ohlmeyer. “As an academic, I’m so happy if a couple of thousand people buy my books, that’s a success. And then all of a sudden we’re producing a very compelling narrative that hundreds of thousands, ultimately millions, of people will see. And at the same time the narrative is very much grounded in empirical history and told by experts, many of whom of course are Trinity academics, although not exclusively.”

Nic Dhiarmaida agrees: “You can see that our contributors were incredible. They’re academics at the top of their game. These people are so passionate, so compelling, but also so erudite and rigorous about what they’re saying. It was a total joy to be able to sew that together in the edit suite because we had the raw material, and as Jane said, we had beautiful cinematography, beautiful images, incredible knowledge, incredible knowledge holders and knowledge givers.”

- Interview by Dr Sarah Cullen