RTE's decision to bring the curtain down on Glenroe next May ends not just a long-running and highly successful series, but a whole era in Irish television drama.
Glenroe has anchored RTE's Sunday night programmes since 1983. It evolved directly from the short-lived but highly regarded Bracken, the series which launched actor Gabriel Byrne into superstardom (although he was probably headed in that direction anyway).
But Byrne's Bracken character had, in turn, first emerged in the Riordans, the ground-breaking portrayal of a Kilkenny farming family which was itself a staple of Sunday night viewing for 14 years until 1979. So the 12 episodes of Bracken provide a real if quirky link in an RTE drama sequence that stretches from this, Glenroe's last season, back to 1965.
A more important link was Wesley Burrowes, the main writer in all three series. Ironically, Burrowes is an urban Protestant from Bangor, in Co Down, arguably as far removed from the worlds of Benjy Riordan, Pat Barry (Bracken's chief protagonist) or Miley Byrne as anyone could be on this island.
Yet he managed to portray the preoccupations of a mainly Catholic rural Ireland with an honesty and accuracy that few other television writers have managed.
The realism of the Riordans was taken a lot further in Bracken, where Byrne's Pat Barry (who, in the final episode of the Riordans, learned of his father's death and returned to Wicklow) was a hard-nosed antihero struggling to hold on to the family farm.
But, apart from Byrne's starring role, the 1980 series is now best remembered for introducing the comic double act of Joe Lynch and Mick Lally as the shrewd father and gormless son, Dinny and Miley Byrne.
When Joe Lynch parted from the cast at the end of last season, with some bitterness over RTE's treatment of him, the writing was on the wall for Glenroe.
The announcement followed fast upon his screen daughter-in-law Mary McEvoy's decision to quit the series, in which she was killed off in a dramatic car accident.
Glenroe topped the ratings some 200 times, but its glory days had been behind it for some time. "Every series has its day," RTE's director of television Cathal Goan said yesterday. "It has been clear for some time that Glenroe is coming to the end of its natural life."