“Uncivilized” Catholic Ireland

Neil Jordan is Ireland’s greatest and most successful film director. His 1992 movie The Crying Game was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Screenplay, which Jordan won. Michael Collins, which starred Liam Neeson and Julia Roberts, won the Golden Lion at Venice. Jordan recently gave an interview to the BBC about the experiences and ideas that have influenced his career. It’s a good listen and Jordan, as you’d expect, has some memorable and insightful things to say. But he also says some pretty odd things—things redolent of the glib but widespread assumption that the culture of mid-century Ireland was irredeemably, comprehensively, contemptibly backwards. 

It begins when Jordan responds to a question about whether he had film-making ambitions “as a kid.” The reply comes: “No, I didn’t. Nobody Irish could have at the time because they didn’t make them there.” Since Neil Jordan was born in 1950, the listener’s takeaway is that there was no film production in Ireland in, say, the 1950s and 1960s. 

However, this isn’t true. Setting aside the filming of certain U.S. or U.K.-made blockbusters—think John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952), or David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter (1970)—strenuous efforts were underway to create and sustain a home-grown Irish film industry precisely when Jordan was “a kid.” Two years before he was born, in fact, Ardmore Film Studios had been established by an extraordinary man called Emmet Dalton. 

Born in Fall River, Massachusetts, and reared in Dublin, Dalton had served with distinction as a junior officer in the British army throughout the First World War, and was awarded the Military Cross for bravery. Returning home, this devout, lifelong Catholic joined the struggle against the British in the Irish War of Independence. 

Neil Jordan must surely know about Emmet Dalton. Yet, in his BBC comments, he spoke as though films such as Shake Hands with the Devil, starring James Cagney, made at Ardmore and released in 1959, or The Playboy of the Western World, directed by Belfast-born Brian Desmond Hurst and released in 1962, simply never existed. The latter was an adaptation of J. M. Synge’s play, one of the acknowledged masterpieces of Irish literature. Meanwhile, 1963 saw Francis Ford Coppola make his first feature-length film at Ardmore, a low-budget horror movie called Dementia 13. 

More broadly, there was also a certain film culture, however modest, in Ireland when Neil Jordan was a child. For instance, another Ardmore-made film, This Other Eden, directed by Muriel Box and described as addressing “emigration, the power and wealth of the Church, the reverence of nationalist martyrs, illegitimacy and anti-English hostility” (no signs of narrow-mindedness there), received its premiere at the Cork International Film Festival, which is only ten years younger than Cannes and much older than Toronto or Sundance. And already in the late 1930s, a hefty quarterly review titled Bonaventura, edited by Fr. Senan, a Capuchin priest, was publishing a regular cinema column that posed questions like “Can Ireland Make Films?” and “Are We Sufficiently Cinema Minded?” 

Now, to be clear: to describe film-making in Ireland in those days as fragile would be entirely justifiable. But to pretend it didn’t exist at all seems perverse. So why did Neil Jordan do it?  

Well, in part, it makes for a good story. To get anywhere in life, the plucky, impoverished Paddy needed first to get away from dead-end Ireland. Speaking about leaving for London, Jordan lays it on thick: “We’re talking about the seventies, 1970, I would have been twenty. Every Irish person either went on the dole, became an alcoholic, or went to England, became a laborer, or ended up somewhere in between.” 

Let’s allow that Jordan is, at least partly, being mischievous and hyperbolic. (He went up another gear for The Guardian newspaper when referring to his move to England: “Probably somebody who leaves North Korea for South Korea would have the same experience.”) But let’s also remember that, while there were indeed plenty of people on the dole, the unemployment rate in Ireland in the early seventies was actually not much higher than in the U.K.: around 5.5 percent versus 4.5 percent.  However, for Jordan simply to have said that, quite rationally, he went to England because the cinema industry and the literary scene were so much greater and more opportunity-rich than in Ireland wouldn’t have evoked quite the same self-serving mood of romance and despair.

But there is more to Jordan’s remarks than just that. Neil Jordan, and his right-thinking BBC listeners, view the Ireland of those days, from top to bottom, as a poor, priest-ridden, censorship-stifled, philistinic wasteland. Of course, only a fool would argue that there was nothing about mid-century Ireland that needed to change; that the position of the Church in society was all to the good, or that cinema and the arts flourished unencumbered. But why not simply tell the truth about it? Why always paint the country your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents made as irredeemably primitive?  

Frantz Fanon, the famous Martiniquais psychiatrist and political philosopher, comes whispering to my mind with some added explanatory power. He famously once wrote that the first thing the colonizer does is to “plant deep in the mind of the native population the idea that, before the advent of colonialism, their history was one which was dominated by barbarism.” Ridding the people of their barbaric papist faith was among the dearest objectives of English policy toward Ireland over many centuries. Heaping insults and ridicule on the heads of the Irish was one of the (gentler) methods employed. 

Are there traces of what Fanon theorized in Neil Jordan’s attitude? “I think the Ireland I grew up in was still not entirely civilized,” he told the BBC. “I mean it was this kind of blasted, Catholic Church kind of universe, you know, wedded to a whole bed of superstition.” England, by contrast, was “where people finished their sentences,” where “people make sense,” where “real things happen.” The effort in Ireland to build a fully independent, self-determining republic, with its own broadcaster, airline, state industries, armed forces, social welfare systems, and so on, was barely thirty years old; yet nothing real was happening there, apparently.      

Ultimately, Neil Jordan’s remarks represent a worldview in which all counterfactuals—however minor, however rightly hedged about with caveats—to the dominant version of Ireland’s cultural and social history in the twentieth century must be blotted out entirely. They demonstrate, once again, how, in these days, it is not permitted for even the smallest ray of light to reach us from that poor, benighted land.

John Duggan is a freelance writer based in England.

First Things depends on its subscribers and supporters. Join the conversation and make a contribution today.

Click here to make a donation.

Click here to subscribe to First Things.

Image by Giuseppe Milo via Creative Commons. Image cropped.