SOMEWHERE between Countess Markievicz and President Mary Robinson, Irish women seem to have lost the ability to make it into the history books. I began this documentary as a search to find out why," says Trish McAdam, director of Hoodwinked, a new three part series on Irish women past and present.

While she doesn't directly answer this question in the series apart from oblique references to Cumann na mBan's anti treaty stance and later their opposition to the 1937 Constitution, hence their absence from the forefront McAdam chronicles the changes in the lives of Irish women from the 1920s to the 1990s under headings such as education, contraceptives, adoption, feminism, the North, equal rights, divorce and abortion.

If you think that together the three programmes encompass a period which only represents one lifetime, the changes in Irish women's lives are incredible particularly in the last 30 years.

Just as it is pleasing to hear the confident contemporary voices of Irish female politicians such as Labour TD Roisin Shortall, businesswoman Gillian Bowler, housewife Maureen Carroll and historian Mary Cullen, it is equally shocking for this thirty something writer to be reminded that less than 40 years ago, allowing girls to marry at the tender age of 12 was deemed to be the correct way of dealing with teenage pregnancies and that in the 1940s, having a baby a year was seen to be a sign of good health for women.

Explaining her choice of title for the series, McAdam asks whether or not Irish women were hood winked in the past into believing in an idealised image of a pure, mother, homemaker and whether they are equally "hood winked" now into believing that legislative equality will solve all their problems.

Answering this, McAdam believes that, yes, Irish women were deluded and deceived into thinking their lives would be different. Ireland was a much more rural society domestic power at home was something women were more, content with. However, there was an incredible amount of poverty and ignorance, and the reality of staying at home to mind children often didn't live up to the ideal," she says. She cites Noel Browne's Mother and Child scheme in 1951 as a piece of legislation that would have been incredibly beneficial to women, yet the church and many members of the medical profession were opposed to it.

And now, in spite of equal pay legislation and wider career choices for women she believes the demands of some jobs still make them very unattractive to women especially women with children. "What society has not taken into account is the fact that most women want to have children and when that comes on the agenda, the structures are not in place to facilitate women to remain in high powered positions."

Through the use of face to camera style interviews, interspersed with archive footage, Hoodwinked manages to include many different voices from the past and the present, including the contrasting views of political activist and former secretary to Sean MacBride, Louie O'Brien and the founder of the Irish Housewives' Association, Hilda Tweedy. While this can, on the one hand, seem confusing to the viewer in that it fails to present a coherent picture or linear progression in terms of striding forwards through history, on the other hand it clearly shows how Irish women continue to draw on their emotional as well as their .rational faculties when it comes to making life choices.

McAdam acknowledges that there are some important issues in women's lives that she has not dealt with for example, women's changing relationships with men and children, and men's input, positive or negative, in this dynamic.

"I see the series as taking an aerial point of view in that I am looking at areas of noticeable impact but I accept criticism that I haven't dealt with many issues. One thing I realised while making the series is what a rich area this is to explore. I could have made a 10 part series and not run out of information. The idea of the series is to excite or ignite debate, not to be a definitive piece on Irish women in the 20th century."

In the closing moments of the third programme, the archivist and feminist activist Catriona Crowe predicts that as we move into the 21st century, the prevailing debate for men and women will be how and why we have children, how we care for them and what children essentially mean to us. Plus ca change and all that.