In the first episode of the Netflix series “Bodkin,” set in the eponymous Irish village, a local criminal, Seamus Gallagher (David Wilmot), confronts one of the series’ protagonists, Gilbert Power (Will Forte) at a pub and dismissively refers to him as the “American podcaster.” As I watched this scene unfold, viewing it by myself on my laptop, I had a suspicion as to where it was headed. As my certainty of Gilbert’s rebuttal began to grow, I could feel my shoulders rise, my back stiffen and my eyes squint, as he responded in a soft California accent, “Actually, I’m Irish.”
With that, I shut my eyes, felt my shoulders hit my ears and pressed my lips tightly together, before exhaling deeply. I knew it. I know it. I know Gilbert. I have been Gilbert. The clueless American tourist in the motherland (while cluelessly referring to it as such—“the motherland”) waxing on about my Irishness to the Irish in Ireland.
I would have the opportunity to live in Ireland many years after that first well-intentioned yet utterly oblivious “homecoming” tour, and it was only then that I came to recognize the supreme hubris of the American-Irish tourist let loose in Ireland for the first time. When family and friends would visit me at the Jesuit residence in Dublin where I resided, I would advise them to be sure to qualify their self-described “Irishness” with a hyphen and a follow-up word like -American or -heritage. It’s not that the native Irish take offense at such claims so much as that they find them to be amusing confirmations of their own prejudices about overconfident American tourists.
Watching the scene from “Bodkin”—several years after my time in Ireland—evoked an initial jolt of secondhand embarrassment (the kind usually reserved for occasions such as accompanying an aging boomer parent to an Apple store). But it also caused me to consider once more the question of Irish identity. Who is Irish? What makes someone or something Irish? What does it mean to be Irish? And who gets to say who gets to be Irish? Defining Irish identity has long been a bone of contention for the Irish people—whoever they may be, according to whatever criteria you choose to use.
Exporting Culture
That this question arose out of a scene from a television series set in Ireland, created by a Brit (Jez Scharf) and produced by an American streaming platform (Netflix) speaks to the transnational reality that has always been the backdrop for Irish film and television. For an island inhabited by approximately seven million people (5.4 million in the Republic and 1.9 million in the six Northern Ireland counties), Ireland has had a disproportionate amount of influence on global culture relative to its size. Ireland’s cultural legacy has been firmly rooted in music and literature—U2 and James Joyce are two of its most significant cultural exports of recent memory, and two of yours truly’s personal favorites.
And since the emergence of Maureen O’Hara in the 1940s, whose flaming red locks led her to be crowned Hollywood’s “Queen of Technicolor,” Ireland has consistently made significant contributions to the English-speaking film and television industries as well. And it is Ireland’s unstable and frequently peripheral relationship with the two dominant Anglophone film and television industries in Hollywood and Great Britain, as well as its own attempt to define an indigenous national cinema, that I would like to suggest can be mapped onto the perpetually fluctuating question of Irish identity itself.
This is to say that questions of Irish identity and “Irishness” are, and always have been, in a state of flux, which is also the case surrounding discourses around Irish film and television. What is an Irish film (or TV series for that matter)? What makes a film Irish? This has been the question since cinema began, or at least since Mary Kate Danaher (O’Hara) and Sean Thornton (John Wayne) first played “patty fingers” at the holy water font in Irish-American director John Ford’s classic “The Quiet Man” (1952). Similarly, what makes anyone or anything Irish? Birthplace? Passport? Religion?
Though the question of Irish identity did not begin in the 20th century, its international significance certainly did with the establishment of an independent Irish state in the 1920s, after centuries of rule by the British. Of course, Ireland’s break with their British colonizer did not prove to be a clean one, as those six northern counties remain under British rule.
The understanding of the Irish people as fundamentally rural, Roman Catholic and culturally Gaelic was promulgated by many in positions of power—both civil and ecclesiastical—over the first half-century of the newly formed Irish state, and was ideologically fundamental to many of the problems that took root in the North.
The 1990s brought about two significant moments that altered conceptions of what it meant to be Irish: the Good Friday Agreement and the rise of the Celtic Tiger. The Good Friday Agreement took place in April 1998 and for the most part put an end to the sectarian violence in the North, as well as opening up the border between the two Irish states.
The Celtic Tiger is a name given to the period of remarkable economic growth that began in the mid-1990s and came to an end with the global recession at the end of the first decade of the 2000s. The Irish economy’s rapid and expansive growth led to an equally accelerated demographic shift, with the Republic transitioning seemingly overnight from being a locus of emigration into a primary destination for immigrants, especially from Eastern Europe and South America.
These two revelatory moments in Ireland’s recent history set the stage for the significant social and cultural shifts that have occurred since the beginning of the new millenium. These included the legalization of divorce, abortion and same-sex marriage and the general rise of secularism.
Modernization, both economic and cultural—something Ireland embraced later than its counterparts in Western Europe—played a role in the decline of religiosity in Ireland. However, the blame for the rapid rise of secularization in Ireland, particularly in the Republic, in large part falls squarely on the shoulders of the Catholic Church itself. This, of course, is primarily due to the revelations of abuse and its cover-ups that have been the order of the day in the Irish media since the mid-1990s and that were documented in multiple government reports within the past three years.
Another factor in the decline of religiosity was the theology that was—and still is, in many places—promulgated by the church, which the Irish sociologist Tom Inglis refers to as a “simple faith.” It offered a duty-bound and unquestioning notion of God and church, wherein the laity remained placidly submissive to ecclesial authority and compliant in matters of practice and devotion.
Movies With Granny
As a little boy, every year on Paddy’s Day, I would find myself seated beside my Granny, herself the daughter of immigrants from Counties Mayo and Galway respectively, in her house on Chicago’s North Side, watching a local station’s annual airing of “The Quiet Man.” To many Irish immigrants and their children, Ford’s film had at some point transformed from a fictional cinematic artifact to an authentic historical memory. Innisfree, the fictional rural village where “The Quiet Man” is set, with its fiery colleens, lush, green landscapes and thatch-roofed cottages, had become the romanticized reality of the Ireland they had left behind.
But ironically, even the question of the Irishness of this film is up for speculation. It was set and filmed in the west of Ireland, primarily in the village of Cong in County Mayo. Many of its actors were Irish-born nationals, including O’Hara, as well as perpetual scene-stealer and lovable imp Barry Fitzgerald, who portrayed the town bookmaker and busybody, Michaeleen Flynn. Other members of the cast could claim Irish heritage, including Wayne (born Marion Morrison). John Ford himself was part of the Irish diaspora, his parents having emigrated from Ireland in the latter part of the 19th century.
However, “The Quiet Man” is very much a product of Hollywood, financed by an American studio (Republic Pictures) and featuring a host of non-Irish performers. Perhaps most notable was the American actor Ward Bond as the village priest, Father Peter Lonergan. Bond, like many of the actors in the cast, including O’Hara and Wayne, was a part of Ford’s informal “company” of actors that he regularly used in his films. This stock company of actors repeatedly proved to be just as comfortable in Ford’s myriad films set in the American Old West as they were in the rural Irish setting of “The Quiet Man.”
There was little in the way of indigenous film production in Ireland until the late 1970s. But the industry grew significantly in the ’90s, thanks to the economic boom and the re-creation of the Irish Film Board, now called Screen Ireland, in 1993. Screen Ireland began providing funding for the development, production and distribution of films and led to an extraordinary increase in films being made in and about Ireland by Irish natives.
What emerges when discussing Irish film, then, is a mélange of transnational cinematic projects that are considered more or less Irish. There is, for example, Element Pictures, an Irish production and distribution company that initially focused on Irish-based projects like the zombie/horror mishmash “Boy Eats Girl” (directed by Stephen Bradley, 2005) and the rising Irish auteur Lenny Abrahamson’s debut feature, “Adam & Paul” (2004). Element has subsequently moved into backing more international products, most significantly the works of the Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, whose films include the Oscar-winning “The Favourite” (2018) and “Poor Things” (2023).
This is not to say that Element has entirely abandoned its Irish roots, as it continues to finance Irish-based television series, perhaps most notably “Normal People” (2020), based on the novel of the same title by the Irish author Sally Rooney. “Normal People” received a significant amount of critical acclaim upon its release and catapulted its lead actor, Paul Mescal, to global stardom.
Indeed, if there is any area of the global film industry where Ireland has made a disproportionate contribution, it is in the realm of male actors. Mescal is only the most recent addition to a long list of Irish actors who have crossed the Atlantic and made a name for themselves in Hollywood. Among the most notable are Liam Neeson, Colin Farrell, Cillian Murphy, Pierce Brosnan, Peter O’Toole, Richard Harris, Stephen Boyd and the aforementioned Barry Fitzgerald.
Leading Ladies and Irish Auteurs
Ireland’s track record with female actors is not nearly as robust, with O’Hara still holding pride of place as their most famous leading lady export. However, before the pandemic seemed to stall her career momentum, Saoirse Ronan was one of the most sought-after young actors in the industry and staked her claim as the biggest female name in cinema that Ireland has produced since O’Hara. Still, there are quite a few other talented Irish female actors with lower profiles than Ronan working regularly in high-profile projects, notably the Oscar-nominated Ruth Negga, the “Derry Girls” star Nicola Coughlan and the “Bodkin” star Siobhán Cullen.
In terms of filmmakers, Lenny Abrahamson was set to take the mantle of leading Irish auteur from Sheridan and Jordan after the 2015 success of “Room,” based on the novel by the Irish-Canadian writer Emma Donoghue. “Room” received much critical acclaim and garnered an Academy Award for Best Actress for Brie Larson, the film’s American star. Yet Abrahamson has made only two films in the decade since its release and has instead focused on television projects.
Any conversation about Irish filmmakers must include mention of the London-born McDonagh brothers: Martin and John Michael. Martin, the more famous and younger of the two, is best known for writing and directing “In Bruges” (2008), “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” (2017) and “The Banshees of Inisherin” (2022). The elder brother, John Michael, wrote and directed “The Guard” (2011) and “Calvary” (2014).
Martin rose to fame in the 1990s primarily due to the success of his plays, which are set in the west of Ireland and the islands just off its coast. While both brothers’ work has generally been well received by global audiences and critics, there are those in Irish theater and film circles who aren’t as fond of either of the McDonagh brothers’ depictions of the Irish people, claiming that they frequently rely on negative and archaic stereotypes of the rural Irish.
I contend, however, that John Michael McDonagh’s “Calvary” is easily the most significant film to address the decline of the Catholic Church in Ireland in the wake of the Celtic Tiger and the clerical abuse crisis. It stars Brendan Gleeson as Father James, the pastor of a parish in County Sligo, who is confronted in the confessional by an unseen clerical abuse survivor who informs him that he is giving the priest a week to get his affairs in order before he murders him. According to the prospective killer, the fact that Father James is a “good priest” will make his murder all the more satisfying, as “there’s no point in killing a bad priest. But killing a good one? That’d be a shock, now. They wouldn’t know what to make of it.”
The film then follows the priest over the course of the week as he continues to minister to his wayward flock, a rural community coming to terms with the economic crash in 2008 that brought the Celtic Tiger to a screeching halt. “Calvary” very much places a cinematic punctuation mark on the end of an era in which Irish identity and Catholicism were synonymous terms.
Depictions of the Catholic Church in films set in Ireland, save for a few notable exceptions, have come forth only from the 1980s onward, and as such have typically been critical of the church’s influence and interference in cultural and civil affairs. The abuse revelations that came to the fore in the 1990s provided a new area for cinematic interrogation, and a handful of films from the early 2000s, such as “The Magdalene Sisters” (Peter Mullan, 2002) and “Song for a Raggy Boy” (Aisling Walsh, 2003), used the melodramatic mode as a means of foregrounding the voices of abuse survivors in public discourses surrounding the Catholic Church.
Catholicism still frequently plays a background role in many Irish-based media projects, including “Bodkin” and the acclaimed TV series “Bad Sisters.” But more often than not these days, Catholicism is featured primarily in films and television series about the past, such as the hugely popular “Derry Girls” and the film “Small Things Like These” (Tim Mielants, 2024), starring Cillian Murphy and based on the novella of the same name by the Irish author Claire Keegan. “Small Things Like These,” which is set in the Irish town of New Ross in 1985, exemplifies the transnational nature of Irish cinema with its Irish setting and primarily Irish cast (the British actor Emily Watson being a notable exception in the role of the “bad nun”). Its Belgian director and Irish, Belgian and American (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s Artist’s Equity) financing make it a truly international product.
Where does the Catholic Church find itself in this new Irish cinema? Sadly, a new spate of film and television projects featuring Catholicism negatively can be anticipated in light of a recent wave of abuse revelations coming forward, notably from the high-profile Blackrock College in South Dublin, run by the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, or Spiritans. This leaves the Irish church in the double bind of being culturally referred to as either a relic of the past or the locus of abuse. All the while, Irish society continues to be transformed from an insular, homogenous, developing outback to a cosmopolitan, diverse, pluralistic member of the greater European community.
These rapid societal shifts are allowing for new stories and storytellers to come to the fore in the Irish cinematic universe, particularly women and the “new Irish”—i.e., immigrants from Eastern Europe, Latin America and Africa. But for the Catholic Church in Ireland, its role both socially and culturally seems to diminish more and more.
