Seán Crosson

Ar son an Náisiúin: The National Film Institute of Ireland's All-Ireland Films

On 4 september 1948 the Irish Independent carried a small announcement on page ten indicating that the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) had authorized the filming of the All-Ireland hurling and football finals of that year. These finals were to be filmed by the National Film Institute (NFI) of Ireland, set up three years earlier, and this announcement marked the beginning of the first sustained period of indigenous filming of Gaelic games in Ireland. Although important research has been done on the crucial link between the codification and popularization of Gaelic games in Ireland and the development of Irish nationalism in the late nineteenth century, the role that filmic representations of sport may have played in this developing process in the twentieth century has as yet been the subject of limited investigation. This article builds on previous research about the representation of Gaelic games in early newsreels between 1920 and 1939 in order to consider the filmic depictions of All-Ireland finals produced by the NFI and their role, particularly in the 1940s and 1950s, in representing and affirming the Irish nation through

The Shore (2011): Examining the Reconciliation Narrative in Post-Troubles Cinema

This chapter considers the promotion and reception of the Northern Ireland set Oscar-winning short film The Shore (2011) and its employment within the post-Belfast/Good Friday Agreement reconciliation discourse. Film is one of the most revelatory sites to view how this discourse has been formulated and circulated, evident particularly in the recurring focus on filiative reconciliation, operating at the level of the family rather than society, within cinematic texts. Cinema also suggests the failure of this discourse to engage with the real underlying and unresolved issues in the post-Agreement context. Indeed, film has tended to obscure and elide these fundamentals, producing ultimately utopian depictions, often revealing a touristic gaze, for mass consumption. In this respect, The Shore is a remarkable rendering not so much of either Northern Ireland or the post-Troubles context, but of the dominant representational paradigms within depictions of Ireland itself.

Configuring Irishness through coaching films: Peil (1962) and Christy Ring (1964)

Abstract The sports coaching film has a long history, dating from at least 1932 with the production of Paulette McDonagh’s How I Play Cricket which featured the legendary Don Bradman. However, coaching films dedicated to indigenous Irish sport, or Gaelic games, are a more recent development, emerging in the late 1950s. This article considers two such films – Peil (Louis Marcus, 1962) and Christy Ring (Louis Marcus, 1964) – dedicated to Gaelic football and hurling, respectively, and produced by the Irish-language cultural organisation Gael Linn. The principal concern in undertaking this examination is to identify the process by which these films configure Irishness, not just through the depictions of the indigenous sports featured but also through the manner in which these depictions are framed. In “configuring Irishness”, the article examines in particular how these films articulate Irish identity and its constituent properties, particularly in terms of language, geography, politics and religion, thereby “coaching” viewers in Irishness itself, its features, and Ireland’s political and moral leaders.

“The Given Note” Traditional Music, Crisis and the Poetry of Seamus Heaney

These remarks from Walter Benjamin provide a useful starting point from which to examine the presence of traditional music in the poetry of Irish poet Seamus Heaney. Much as Benjamin noted the changed relationship between the traditional storyteller and his audience, and that between the novelist and his reader, I want to suggest a parallel differentiation between the creation and communication of traditional music and its emergence and role in the work of Heaney. Furthermore, this chapter proposes that at a time when Northern Ireland increasingly descended into civil strife and crisis, Heaney looked to landscape and, to a lesser but comparable extent, traditional music, to articulate a distinctive voice, beyond the claims of tradition and community, ‘to use the first person singular’ as he has remarked, ‘to mean me and my lifetime’ (Randall, 1979, p. 20). Indeed, Heaney has faced a crisis of identity that has preoccupied Irish poets since at least the time of Yeats, a crisis brought on by the discontinuity in the Irish literary tradition, by an unresolved postcolonial condition and a struggle between the pull of community and tradition and that of the individual artist. Heaney’s poetry has been challenged by the tensions that underlie relations between each of these elements. Within his work, one finds a quest for motifs, including that provided by traditional music, adequate to his own predicament.

SPORT AND THE MEDIA IN IRELAND: An introduction

The symbiotic relationship that has existed since the mid-nineteenth century between sport and the media*from the popular press, through newsreels and radio, to television, and beyond*is so well established as hardly to require comment. However, the very familiarity of this long and successful marriage should not blind us to its abiding, and abidingly remarkable, affective power, both for individuals and for communities, real and ‘imagined’, of all kinds. We may thus legitimately pause to reflect on the key role played by the media in establishing the local, national and international significance of what are inherently ephemeral and objectively trivial corporeal practices. Whether it be through the national football cultures of England and Scotland, or the national cycling cultures articulated through Spain’s Vuelta, Italy’s Giro and, especially, the Tour de France, sport annually continues to mobilise millions of spectators, whether physically present or, especially, by means of the mass media. This is even more obviously true of such major international competitions as the World Cup, European Championship and European Champions League competitions in association football. To pursue a little further the example of the Tour de France*an event launched in 1903 by the specialist sports newspaper L’Auto, as part of a combined commercial and political circulation war with its rival Le Vélo in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair*we might even argue that France’s ‘great bike race’ is actually and annually brought into existence by the media. As Jacques Marchand, one of the event’s most seasoned reporters, once remarked: ‘cycle road racing does not really have spectators, it has readers above all’ (Marchand 11). For Marchand, the fleeting vision of the race itself meant little to the crowds massed on the roadside. Indeed, they became conscious of its significance*as lived experience, rendered comprehensible and thus comprehended*only when the event had been variously reconstituted, and thus effectively translated, by its only permanent spectators, that is the accompanying journalists. This special number of Media History is conceived as a contribution to the ongoing scholarly analysis of sport’s social significance, as a set of mass-mediated practices and spectacles giving rise to a complex network of images, symbols and discourses. Its specific aim is to examine the distinctive contribution of various sports*as communicated by a range of mass media*to the creation of modern Irish identities. For sport inhabits a central place in Irish life, more possibly than in any other country in Europe. Indeed, sport provides a defining element in many Irish people’s sense of themselves and their country. One might even suggest that given the loss of an indigenous language to most Irish people and the increasing secularisation of the country, sport is as important as a distinct marker of identity now in Ireland as at any point in the country’s history. And this in a country in which the emergence and consolidation of Irish nationalism and the building of the Irish state were inextricably linked with sport, in particular the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), still the largest sporting organisation on the island. Indeed, uniquely again in international sport, Gaelic games (essentially amateur in ideology and practice) continue to be the most popular

'Croke Park goes Plumb Crazy' Gaelic Games in Pathé Newsreels, 1920–1939

From the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, and over the next two decades, arose great efforts in Ireland to augment political independence from Britain with enhanced cultural separation. During this period the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) enjoyed a boom in numbers of players and supporters, thus confirming hurling and Gaelic football as the definitively Irish national games and the association itself as the most popular mass movement for the expression of independent Irish identity. Yet paradoxically, given the popular association of Gaelic games with Irish independence, nearly all footage of these games from that time was produced by foreign companies with a strong British bias. This article will focus primarily on the coverage of Pathé, a leading newsreel company in this period, through an examination of the content of relevant films in the online digital archive of British Pathé, and will explore the conditions of their production and reception in Ireland, including by the GAA, which was usually wary of portrayals in the British media.

‘“They can’t wipe us out, they can’t lick us. We’ll go on forever pa, ‘cause we’re the people” - Misrepresenting death in Jim Sheridan’s In America (2003)'

This paper will examine the recurring theme of death in Jim Sheridans work, with particular focus on his 2003 film In America. This theme also links Sheridans work to one of his favourite directors, John Ford, whose work In America alludes to. While exploring the theme of death in Sheridans films, and how it connects with the work of Ford, this paper will consider responses to In America, the first film to be (partly) shot in New York after the attack on the twin towers, in light of the tragedy of 9/11. It raises questions about the problematic positioning of this film by Sheridan and others not just with respect to the events of that day but also in relation to the 1981 hunger strikes in Northern Ireland. Furthermore, it questions the regressive politics involved in the depiction of the central black character in In America, Mateo, particularly as it relates to this theme of death.