Cassandra Voices

Tag: Sé Merry Doyle’

  • Theocracy – the Emigrant’s Artist

    Sé Merry Doyle’s latest documentary, Theocracy – the Emigrant’s Artist, serves as an excellent introduction to the stirring painting of Bernard Canavan. It offers an intimate portrait of a man whose distressing backstory has yielded extraordinary works of art that amplify our understanding of an appalling system that held sway for so long in Ireland. The film is to be screened at the Cork Film Festival on November 10.

    Bernard, like Shane MacGowan, is an artist who speaks, through his lived experience, for what Joe Cleary has described as the ‘spailpín [lit. ‘journeyman’] culture’ of ‘hard labour and hard living, of wandering and exile, resentment and loss … nurtured by two languages.’

    “Disembarkation”

    There is an added ingredient here. Bernard Canavan was born in Ireland in 1944, but that wasn’t his birth name. As a newborn, he was cruelly removed from the care of his young parents and placed in an orphanage. That his mother and her then-boyfriend had decided to marry didn’t matter. An infant born out of wedlock was viewed as the personification of sin.

    This was an all-too-familiar experience under what can accurately be described as a theocracy governing Ireland after independence. This was a fusion of devout Catholicism with a set of post-colonial Victorian values that emerged in the wake of the Great Famine. This made Ireland a dark place for many decades. Indeed, Ronan Sheehan refers to a ‘theology of incarceration’ governing most aspects of life at that time, realising W. B. Yeats’s concern about an emerging Ireland where ‘men were born to pray and save.’

    ‘Gods love for mothers and their infants’

    In the orphanage, punishment of sin formed only a part of what was also a business enterprise. Children were commodified, offered for adoption or experimented on by pharmaceutical companies.

    Fortunately, as a young child Bernard was rescued by a woman called Margaret Canavan, who was born into an Irish family living in Argentina. After her father’s death, she retuned to Ireland and settled in Edgworthstown, County Longford. This midlands town is the scene of some of Bernard’s most captivating work.

    There, he grew up under a nurturing mother who protected him from the brutality of the education system, and instilled a lifelong love of reading. This autodidact earned a scholarship to Ruskin College in Oxford, later studying politics, philosophy and economics at Worcester College.

    The film includes a memorable visit to the midlands town, where Bernard confronts memories of the pain of women and men, girls and boys, leaving a broken Ireland to face the indignity of the cattle boat and a new life in England. The men would face the harshness of the building sites and lodging houses, the world of subbies, piece work, being ‘on the lump’.

    Whatever you say, say Nothing’

    Bernard’s has long campaigned against the injustices that thousands of children suffered in Irish orphanages. In an emotive scene, Bernard visits Hampstead Heath where a man called Peter Tyrell set himself alight in 1967. As a young lad Peter endured rape and abuse in Letterfrack Industrial School and eventually succumbed to the trauma. The only clue as to his identity was a torn postcard addressed to the Irish civil rights activist and Senator, Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, with whom he had corresponded – and who had made efforts to bring his case to light.

    A highlight of the film is where Bernard makes an emotional return to the place of his incarceration, Saint Patrick’s Guild, ‘The House of Shame.’ There, he bears witness to what happened to him, speaking for other unfortunates who suffered a similar fate, most of whom have not had an opportunity to tell their tales.

    ‘In the Free State’

    Eventually, Bernard emigrated to England, returning briefly to Ireland in the 1960s to work as a marketing executive in Dublin. After two years, however, he returned to England, taking up residence in London, where he still lives. There, he worked on a freelance basis for a variety of underground papers and magazines, producing illustrations, cartoon strips and political satire for the likes of OZ, Peace News and International Times.

    Great credit is due to Sé Merry Doyle for making this film on a shoestring budget. It makes one wonder why so much of Ireland’s interesting cultural output is still occurring on the margins or abroad, unaided and underfunded. Our theocratic model appears to have been replaced by a neoliberal logic of profit and loss, where the work of an artist such as Bernard Canavan becomes a slightly awkward memory.

    Feature Image: “The Innocent”

  • Unforgettable Year: July 2020

    As the pandemic subsided during the summer months in Europe, the southern states of the United States experienced a surge in cases.

    We brought a first hand account from Linda Barnard in a New Orleans care home:

    It’s getting real in here. Newly established, the isolation ward has been set up too close for comfort. From my room, I’m able to hear most comings and goings, and I know the current number of patients is exactly nine. In the last twenty-four hours, out of two patients who went to hospital, one died, though not of Covid-19. Then they moved two more into the ward. What I’m not sure of is how many, in total, have gone to the hospital or been identified as having Covid-19, because they move them around during the night. They say about five or six staff tested positive. But a couple of them were out sick before testing was even available. Me, I hydrate. I take daily doses of vitamins and apple cider vinegar. I’m good.

    Ferguson, Missouri, (c) Barry Delaney.

    The pandemic formed the backdrop to the U.S. Presidential election later this year. Photographer Barry Delaney brought us back to the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory in 2016.

    I left a depressed New York city following the surprise election of Donald Trump in November 2016; a city reeling in disbelief at what occurred – but I had captured history unfold in Time Square – now I was heading into the heartland of how this had actually happened – the Rust Belt – then the bus broke down at night in rural Pennsylvania and I missed my connection to Kentucky. I overnighted in a cheap motel and caught an early bus to Kingsport, as we pulled into Bristol, Virginia we alighted for a cigarette break and this anonymous traveller waved his American flag, in defiance or support? To understand this election, one had to be in the rural American heartland, to see what was actually going on – coal-mining towns decimated by unemployment, despair and opiates.

    Image (c) Daniele Idini

    Meanwhile, Dr. Boidurjo Rick Mukhopadhyay explored the economic impact of the pandemic on SMEs, and the insecurity of work in the gig economy.

    He wants to work Monday nights but not Tuesday afternoons; she is available on Saturday evenings but not on Sunday mornings… Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises often find it challenging to recruit part-time workers, with abundant choices available to gig workers in different sectors, but the pandemic has vividly demonstrated the nature and depth of insecurity of this form of employment.

    Image (c) Daniele Idini

    Similarly, David Langwallner identified a new corporate colonialism in the form of austerity:

    Franz Fanon

    Frantz Fanon’s provided a profound insight into how colonised peoples – The Wretched of the Earth – are required to pay the debts of the occupying powers. This has been reproduced in our own societies in the form of austerity. The occupying powers are now the corporatocracy, or those with inherited wealth. The only difference from the colonial period is they are no longer all from the same ethnic group. In fact a veneer of diversity is achieved with the promotion of a few specimens with varied pigmentation, and an embrace of safe, politically correct policies that ignores structural racism.

    While Dr Marcus de Brun posed the question: ‘Where have all the Lefties Gone?’:

    So where have they all gone, those Beatniks and the latter-day Chés? Today, distinguishing ideological differences between ruling and opposition parties in most Western democracies requires superhuman vision, or no vision at all. Existentialist dialogue about literature or philosophy is rarely found in mainstream media, instead relegated to academia, or that strange cabal, referred to disparagingly as ‘intellectuals’.

    What we are left with is an exaggerated respect for the titans of big business, the market, and venerate unlimited economic growth.

    Image (c) Daniele Idini

    On the theme of social exclusion, Nicole Miller was drawing attention to the drug epidemic that has been afflicting Ireland since the 1980’s:

    The Republic of Ireland has a long history of opioid drug-related deaths. Since 1998, mortalities due to opioids have increased yearly. Indeed, there is now, on average, one drug-related death every day. The majority of these involve users combining two-to-four drugs mainly, heroin, benzodiazepines, methadone and pregabalin.

    Further afield, Keith Bolender was drawing attention to corporate media bias against the Cuban Revolution:

    Criticizing Cuba’s many shortcomings throughout the decades has been an easy endeavour for corporate media. Yet the press has studiously ignored positive aspects of the Revolution. This was seen recently in negative coverage of Havana’s decision to send medical teams to some of the countries hardest hit by COVID-19. Indeed, Cuba was the only nation to provide medical assistance to Italy at the height of the crisis there.

    (c) Hectic Fish

    As in Vietnam the Hectic Fish was finding:

    Storytelling is a shield against loneliness and the unbearable weight of boredom. Truth does not exist, and if it does, then all storytellers are liars. And all storytellers are liars, though Rousseau might have argued that when you are loyal to yourself you are telling nothing but the truth.

    At home in Dublin, meanwhile, statues were on the move from outside the Shelbourne Hotel, an occurrence that drew the critical opprobrium Billy O Hanluain:

    If we are to go back four thousand years and posthumously ‘correct’ the sins of that past, I would fear for many heritage sites around the world tainted by practices and beliefs very much at odds with current ‘enlightened’ standards. In any therapeutic practice, acknowledgment of the past is critical but the difficult work in healing is always how we manage the present, the now, which is after all, the only thing we have.

    And Andrea Reynell caught up with renowned documentary filmmaker Sé Merry Doyle to discuss his new film ‘James Joyce – Reluctant Groom‘ in which poet Niall McDevitt guides us through a London landscape with unknown Joycean associations. The film went back to a period in 1931 when Joyce and his long-term partner Nora Barnacle moved to London for a year to secure a legal marriage.

    Damien Lennon by Brian Culligan Photography.

    July’s musician of the month Damien Lennon reflected on the uncertainty of the pandemic era:

    Grammar expresses a human desire to control time. Regimented in terms of right and wrong, grammar draws lines by which people can express themselves as concurring or not with their own era. Breaking with grammar rules has often been seen as a form of resistance against the dominant forces of a time: take le verlan in disaffected French suburbs for example. But in corona times this paradigm has been inverted: the notion that humanity is at the heart of time has been annihilated. And now, our era has rejected us. Suddenly our grammar is exposed as fantasy. But wasn’t there always an implicit arrogance in the phrase “next week I will be sitting in Tulum drinking tequila”? It seems hubristic that humans are grammatically equipped to script their own future when anything can happen. Such reflections have been on my mind since our latest release flukishly coincided with the pandemic.

    Anakronos (left to right): Caitríona O’Leary, Deirdre O’Leary, Nick Roth, and Francesco Turrisi (photograph by Tara Slye).

    Also in music coverage, Catríona O’Leary finally found an opportunity to work with some of her favourite musicians: Nick Roth, Francesco Turrisi and my sister Deirdre O’Leary, and was inspired by the the witch hunts of medieval Kilkenny:

    But why sing the words of a witch-burner? Because they’re beautiful and I find it interesting to contemplate the contradictions that exist within people. As Stanley Kubrick said when asked if his characters were good or evil, “They are good AND evil!”.

    Kari Cahill

    Artist of the Month Kari Cahill work is grounded in an exploration of landscape:

    The word ‘landscape’ not only refers to the topography of an environment, but also to its existence within society, consciousness and experiences. As we move through our existence we traverse thousands of constantly shifting landscapes – geographic and experiential- moulding them around us. Boundaries shape how we think, move and express ourselves. Our ability to understand ourselves, and our place in this world, rests on our collective responsibility to protect and celebrate our surroundings.

    Finally, Nick Feery ‘the boy from Tore’ brought us back to his eighteenth birthday when he worked for his local builder Whimpy Dunne.

    Unforgettable Year: January 2020

    Unforgettable Year: February 2020

    Unforgettable Year: March 2020

    Unforgettable Year: April 2020

    Unforgettable Year: May 2020

    Unforgettable Year: June 2020

  • Unforgettable Year: March 2020

    ‘It’ had well and truly arrived by March, insidiously working its way into our lives like an unwanted guest who slips through the door unbeknownst. Editorially we were looking at the big picture, assessing the implications of what we used to call ‘the coronavirus’ – before becoming COVID-19 on February 11th – through political, legal and cultural lenses; as well as assessing the direct health impact.

    An important contribution came from Duncan Mclean  a senior researcher with the Research Unit on Humanitarian Stakes and Practices, Médecins Sans Frontières Switzerland. He looked back on the history of infectious disease outbreaks and how these can bring out the very worst prejudices, a phenomenon he described as the ‘medical scapegoat.’

    [I]f sickness has historically been portrayed as a punishment for sin, socially excluded groups and minorities have proven most vulnerable. Whether linked to mortality or fear of the unknown, context is key to understanding the long history of how those on the margins of society have been scapegoated.

    Moreover, in light of the introduction of special powers in the wake of the pandemic in Ireland, barrister and lecturer Alice Harrison examined how in Ireland infringements on civil liberties, such as the removal of jury trials in response to perceived threats to the state, have tended to ‘seep’ into ordinary usage.

    Protecting civil liberties, such as the right to jury trial, may seem less important as long as extraordinary powers are not abused. However, the existence of special powers poses the ongoing risk that they may be exploited by unscrupulous, or even tyrannical, politicians or agents of the state.

    Dr Samuel McManus was, however, able to see a ‘silver lining’ to the crisis:

    If there is a silver lining to this crisis it is the revelation of how connected we are to each other, in ways we have almost forgotten. We are a species with special concerns. We cannot afford to operate alone as individuals; to do so is to threaten us all. This realisation is putting into stark relief the way we have organised our societies over the past few decades.

    He averted to the importance of the state delivering public healthcare, as opposed to profit-driven private institutions:

    Some private health care clinics in Dublin are now putting up signs saying they will not accept patients with respiratory symptoms, directing them towards their G.P’s. This is in one way understandable as a means of limiting transmission, but while the public service is taking extra measures to distribute information and organise the response, these private clinics are under no compulsion to do so.

    Frank Armstrong also assessed Ireland’s early response to the pandemic, pointing to inherent weaknesses, and other factors likely to mitigate the worst effects:

    The pandemic has hit Ireland during a period of political instability after a February general election yielded an indecisive result, with Leo Varadkar’s government no longer commanding a Dáil majority. Notwithstanding the challenge of installing a new cabinet under emergency conditions, it sets a dangerous precedent for a caretaker government to be in power for a prolonged period.

    He was also moved to write a poem ‘Coronavirus’, while Sammy Jay dwelt on the prescription of isolation in another moving poem.

    Image Patricio Cassinoni

    Fans of music and poetry were delighted by the release that month of a first single ‘Murder Most Foul’ from Bob Dylan’s new album Rough and Rowdy Ways. It offered a pleasant distraction from the unfolding global pandemic, although it contained a stark message according to David Langwallner

    Dylan has released a new seventeen minute-long song, ostensibly about the murder of John F. Kennedy, but which is also a travelogue through American cultural history, with Prince Hamlet and the great, deranged 1960s American DJ, Wolfman Jack, as our guide.

    Also, Musician of the Month Judith Ring revealed how she transforms everyday ‘noise’ into music, while exploring the sonic possibilities of different timbres; and Brian Dillon discussed the ideas behind his new solo project The Line. His debut album Matter had been released by Bad Soup Records in February.

    Photograph by Laura Sheeran

    In other cultural coverage, we interviewed documentary filmmaker Sé Merry Doyle, and introduced his documentary ‘Patrick Kavanagh – No Man’s Fool.’

    We also published an essay by Eamon Kelly ‘The Rocky Road to a Republic’ that argued:

    You might think of the film ‘The Rocky Road to Dublin’ as some dated artifact, featuring Dub-a-lin in da rare auld times. But many of the cultural assumptions revealed in the film, and which later went towards hindering the film’s reception, are still very much alive in today’s Ireland. The sacred cows may have changed, but the overall cultural relationship with those things deemed sacred is still strikingly similar.

    Image William Murphy

    On a similar theme, David Langwallner called for A Renewed Deal:

    It is clear that we require a Renewed Deal, bringing Keynesian stabilisation measures, including support for small businesses, social safety nets and the shutting down of corporate tax avoidance. The E.U. must desist from imposing austerity under the guise of the Growth and Stability Pact, and reinforce regulatory protection of labour rights and the environment, resisting the lobbying of giant corporations. Courts in Ireland should also recognise a basic human right to housing, including prohibition against arbitrary eviction, as well as healthcare. So let us organise a petition then for an umbrella organisation to bring a Renewed Deal to the world.

    Langwallner also explored the influence of Slavoj Zizek in his Public Intellectual Series.

    ©Basso CANNARSA Opale/Alamy Stock Photo

    Meanwhile in international coverage Elliot Moriarty argued for more nuanced treatment of Rojava, the autonomous administration of north and east Syria:.

    Coverage of the region in the Western media tends to refer to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and ‘the Kurds’ interchangeably. This reinforces a reductive narrative of the SDF as being comprised of fearless but naive nationalists, apparently content to sacrifice themselves in the pursuit of a Kurdish statehood aligned to U.S. interests in the region.

    Image: Alexis Daloumis

    Even further afield in Indonesia, the Hectic Fish was discovering the dubious pleasures of ex-pat life on the island:

    f I end up in prison again, I will enjoy it as much as I did twenty years ago. There is justice at the end of shadows. And there is poetry behind bars. It is bad, but you are worse.

    Another anonymous writer The Man in the Black Pyjamas was bemoaning the impact of the housing crisis on the young people of his generation living in Dublin in ‘Gone’:

    “The country’s changed,” my friend said as we sat in our small, dawn-lit kitchen at half-five in the morning having toast and tea. A month later the landlord raised our rent by 30%, and four years on now we’re all gone from Dublin. Me and my friends, and probably most of the people out drinking in the sun that day. We celebrated equality and left a day or a month or a year later. Off to London or South America or Asia or the Middle East or back down the country or onto friends’ couches or back in with our parents or into homelessness. I wish I could go back to those days, but it’s all gone now: that Dublin, those people, that hope.

    We also had Sarah Hamilton discussing the challenges for aspiring female writers in an interview with Sarah Savitt of Vertigo who said:

    Don’t get too carried away, wasting time on followers and trying to build up clout. You need to know the ecosystem. Spend your time instead learning about how to get an agent, which publishers would suit you, reading work related to them. Follow the submission guidelines that are listed on an agent/publisher’s page. It gives you a better running. Most importantly, keep writing. After all this time, it still really is about the words.

    Furthermore, there was an extraordinary memoir ‘A Rat on the Wall’ from Stephen Mc Randal recalling the ill-treatment of a schoolboy in 1960’s Belfast.

    Illustration by Malina | Artsyfartsy.

    Further poetry came from the irrepressible Kevin Higgins who pointed to enduring fascistic tendencies in Ireland with ‘The Continuing Story of Óglaigh na hÉireann’

    On a more celestial note Kathleen Scott Goldinway brought us ‘The Lamps of the Virgins’

    Finally, the third hard copy edition of Cassandra Voices was launched at the end of March, and featured the introduction by Frank Armstrong,

    That new edition contained a memorable essay by Irish human rights campaigner, educator, film-maker and therapist, Caoimhe Butterly on the theme of Displacement:

    I knew that I should be there, in whatever capacity was useful – to witness, accompany and respond, to platform and archive journeys that were defined by such profound and often overwhelming displacement, external and internal.

    Unforgettable Year: January 2020

    Unforgettable Year: February 2020

  • Sé Merry Doyle: James Joyce – Reluctant Groom

    Andrea Reynell caught up with renowned documentary filmmaker Sé Merry Doyle to discuss his new film ‘James Joyce – Reluctant Groom‘ in which poet Niall McDevitt guides us through a London landscape with unknown Joycean associations. The film takes us back to period in 1931 when Joyce and his long-term partner Nora Barnacle moved to London for a year in order to secure a legal marriage. The film also demonstrates that in this period of Covid-19 necessity is the mother of invention.

    Andrea Reynell: Why was Joyce’s marriage to Nora worthy of a documentary?

    Sé Merry Doyle: Well, it mainly came about through Niall McDevitt – the person who leads the whole story – and a well-known poet in London; an Irish poet, very well known in Irish poetry circles. Niall gives literary cycle or walking tours where he uses the landscape to tell stories. He often draws large crowds. I filmed him pre-Covid-19 doing one on Oscar Wilde just to have the material. There were about twenty people traipsing around Wildean landscapes. I noticed how brilliant he was and we became friends and then we did a small film called The Battle of Blythe Road, which was a temple dedicated to the goddess Isis in Hammersmith that W.B Yeats used to run, and where he got into feats of daring do with Aleister Crowley, who was into black magic. Nobody knew about this place in London.

    Before telling you how the Joyce film happened, I’ll backtrack a bit. I came to London to show some films, documentaries I had made in The Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith and while I was here I ended up making a feature documentary called The Knitting Ring featuring older Irish women, and then Covid-19 hit and the whole place got locked down. Then the Irish Cultural Centre decided to start a digital channel. So we got together lots of musicians, poets, and writers. I was coordinating this with Rosalind Scanlon who’s the cultural director. So since then we’ve been posting weekly on ICC Digital.

    The Battle of Blythe Road was my first commissioned piece for them and I went out with Niall. It was just shot on the iPhone, rough and ready but became a viral hit let’s say. Then we decided to take on James Joyce after Niall told me the story. Again the attraction was that it was just me, Niall, and the iPhone with some sound editing. So it was perfect in a Covid-19 world.

    It’s about James Joyce coming to London in 1931 to get married because of a law saying you had to live there for a year beforehand. So he came for a year with his wife Nora and his daughter Lucia, and his son Giorgio came over quite a lot as well.

    AR: How have current circumstances had an impact on your work?

    SMD: Funnily enough before I came to London, I was living in Abbeyleix in Co. Laois, with my daughter and there wasn’t much work. I don’t want to be negative about Ireland, but there was very little happening and I felt like I couldn’t afford to live in Dublin anymore and that’s why I had to move out. I found the environment slightly hostile whenever I tried to put anything out, but then I came to London, and all of a sudden all these people were asking: do you make documentaries and would you make this and that? It felt like a breath of fresh air. People admired me for what I could do and I didn’t have to go out for a pint with someone and find nothing would happen afterwards.

    Since Covid-19 in a way I’ve been busier than ever. I go out and shoot little films for ICC Digital. We’re filming some stuff next week under controlled measures. Then I return to my editing suite and balcony near Wimbledon Woods. So my environment is safe from Covid-19.

    I see the Joyce film as something that could sit very well on RTE, even though it’s shot on an iPhone; a half-hour film produced extremely economically. So I’m enjoying this new relationship with my iPhone and I’ve been filming poets and actors like Nora Connolly. She did a Bloomsday event. I know certain musicians are having a terrible time right now. Musicians are suffering more than others in the pandemic. They are out there all the time. Now I like going out as well. I like nothing more than bringing all the material back. So, it’s suiting my particular field.

    AR: How would you say that independent differ from mainstream films?

    In the last couple of years I’ve been mainly working on feature-length documentaries films that are 70-75 minutes long and do well on the festival circuit. I did a film recently on Simon Walker’s father the architect Robin Walker; also on the famous animator Jimmy Murakami who animated When the Wind Blows and The Snowman, and came to Ireland and married. His childhood secret is that he was interned in a Concentration Camp in America for Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbour.

    At least in the Covid-19 era RTE are starting to show feature-length documentaries again. So I would say there is a very fine line between mainstream and non-mainstream. I think TV stations are in danger of losing a large audience though who are not necessarily all intellectuals, but who like a good story and don’t want to be spoon fed: they want to engage with the material and to think for themselves. I think if they took more chances they’d have more success. Fine, at 8 o’clock schedule Coronation Street, but after 9.30 let’s make it a little more loose. We are seeing the same trends is Britain. My colleagues tell me that BBC Four is closing soon or being ‘dumped’ as Boris puts it.

    Media is a very complex. A lot of people are streaming, and don’t watch TV any more. I still like watching TV. I like saying “oh this is on now” and just sitting back.

    It’s a huge world for our little film on James Joyce. It’s reliant on word of mouth. It’s very hard to know where to place yourself. I think it’s a film that could easily sit in the mainstream. The story is very well told, Nial McDevitt doesn’t over intellectualise. He’s joyous. But finding outlets is extremely hard.

    AR: Do you think that 28 Campden Grove, James Joyce’s London residence should hold greater significance?

    SMD: I don’t know. London always was the flight path for Irish artists, going back to Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, and all sorts of people. London was a jewel of a city for extending creativity. And you see all the blue plaques around the place. A lot of the film involved Niall talking but then he encountered the man who lived there (on Campden Grove) and another guy was moving out. It’s moments like these when a documentary comes alive: somebody coming into the frame unexpectedly, and if you’re a good documentarian you hope to capture that. Another person might say “oh no somebody’s moving out, you better stop filming you know,” but I prefer to take all that in. Films that are set on the street involve people telling a story. All of a sudden somebody reveals a whole lot of things that you never knew. It makes the street much more interesting to be able to say: “oh look, James Joyce lived here for a year.”

    It is interesting with all the statues being pulled down. A statue is not a blue plaque, but it is something saying this person fought in India, or where ever, and it may be contentious, but should we take it down?

    I did a film long ago about the sculptor John Henry Foley called ‘Sculpture to the Empire.’ But John Henry Foley also made ones of Daniel O’Connell and Henry Grattan and Oliver Goldsmith too. He probably has more statues standing in Ireland than anybody else. But a couple of his statues like the one of Field Marshall Gough in the Phoenix Park were attacked several times by the IRA. Eventually it was moved out of Ireland. So you have this dichotomy around what to do. In India one guy said that we should leave the statues and say that this person was a bastard, and he can bring his children to tell a history. Maybe we have to find a way to absorb them and so in India they put them all in sculptured graveyards. Most of the films I’ve done are set in Dublin. You walk out the door and you can find a story in five minutes. It’s all around you.

    AR: In October 2019 it was proposed that Joyce’s remains should be repatriated for the centenary of the publication of Ulysses in 2022. It was not met with enthusiasm. What are your thoughts on the matter?

    SMD: I always wanted to see his statue in Trieste. I liked the fact that he wandered the Earth. Removing his remains at this stage is not a big deal for me. It’s a sideline issue. I was running Bloomsday for a number of years in Dublin in a Duke Street Gallery and various poets and people would come on that day to sing a song or read a poem. John Behan, Ireland’s most famous sculptor always had this fascination with Leopold Bloom and we’re part of a little campaign now to get a statue of Leopold Bloom erected in Dublin. He is one of the most famous fictional characters in the world and is emblematic of fair play and experiences racism too. We thought that this would be a great subject for a statue. I’d love to get Leopold more into the consciousness of Dublin. Joyce used to imagine Dublin in his consciousness and he gave us that great gift in Ulysses. It’s more the atmosphere of Joyce and his works that should be celebrated I think. So leave him be and let him rest in peace wherever he is and God bless him.

    Joyce in Trieste

    AR: James Joyce never set foot on Irish soil after he left the country for the last time in 1912. Do you think his exile and the fact that he has no living descendents as of January 2020 has an impact on his legacy in Ireland?

    SMD: I think he’ll shine on. He broke the mould like Shakespeare. He had a tragic life in lots of ways. I was just discussing his daughter Lucia suffering from schizophrenia. He dictated most of Finnegans Wake to her; a fairly incomprehensible book for a lot of people, but Joyce said it should be read aloud, and I think the schizophrenia in the language uses Lucia’s fragmented mind. She lived and died in an asylum in Northampton, leaving no children. Giorgio gave us Stephen who was a very difficult character in terms of Joyce’s legacy.

    AR: Did the documentary turn out differently to what you had envisioned?

    SMD: The Battle of Blythe Road was a rehearsal for doing this one, but It was odd for me as I’d normally have Paddy Jordan on camera. A lot of technical stuff has terrified me. And I remember the iPhone ran out of memory at one point and it started deleting shots, and we also had to go to a café to get a bit of charge, but I got through it, and really enjoyed the experience. I’m not saying I’d like to take this approach all the time. I’d like to have somebody on sound. It was just me and Niall and I’d never experienced that before and I enjoyed it, but it’s nicer having a crew, but needs must.

    AR: Do you have any further plans for collaborating with Niall McDevitt?

    SMD: We’re planning an Oscar Wilde film, and are currently at the drawing board stage as to what that might entail. Again it’s going to a product of this Covid-19 period. With Joyce we were talking about going to Dublin, Zurich, Trieste, Paris – you know the story of James Joyce’s life – but until Covid-19 abates we’ll stay in an area that we can control, but we’re out filming again on the 27th of July. We’re bringing a lot of artists into The Irish Cultural Centre for lectures and poetry. It’s just three days of filming with people. It’s a very strange time for everyone as you have social distancing. Nobody’s working properly. We don’t know when it’s going to end. So everyone has to find new outlets and new ways of keeping going.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3vQBobNjSw

  • Documentary – Patrick Scott: Golden Boy

    Sucked in by day-to-day dramas, or absorbed by the most closely studied pandemic in the history of medicine, the mental space to muse idly is severely circumscribed. But we may find a portal, removed from the daily thud of mortality lists and the slow grind of lockdowns, to raise the spirit. Art is more important than ever at this time.

    Shamefully, I had hardly engaged with the great Irish artist Patrick Scott before watching Sé Merry Doyle’s vital documentary ‘Patrick Scott: Golden Boy,’ from The Loopline Collection stored in the Irish Film Archive.

    This grand old man of Irish art passed away in 2014, aged ninety-three. Doyle’s documentary provides a vital record of an artist whose work is infused with a tranquillity and balance, seemingly derived from lifelong interest in Zen Buddhism. It is an influence apparent in mesmeric meditative tables skillfully integrated into the film.

    Doyle’s intimate portrayal takes us into the artist’s home, which he shares with an elegant black cat. ‘I’ve never got a cat, they’ve always got me,’ Scott reveals as the feline owner brushes softly against his forearm, whereupon he receives a loving stroke. Although the speech is slowed by age, calm deliberation is still on display, and evident throughout his oeuvre too.

    The documentary takes us to Scott’s family roots on a substantial farm in Country Cork that is still occupied by a relation. The ‘Golden Boy’ came from a comfortable Protestant background, before boarding school at St Columba’s College in the Dublin mountains.

    The turbulent conditions of the 1930s and 1940s, including the Economic War, which almost bankrupted his family, and frustrated a wish to train as an architect – the standard career opportunity for anyone of an artistic bent at the time – before the intercession of a family friend allowed him to begin his studies in UCD.

    Patrick Scott spent fifteen years working as an architect under the great Michael Scott, who was no relation. Although it may not have been his first love, the cross fertilization that occurred seems to have been mutually beneficial.

    Among the projects that Patrick worked on in that period was the Busáras building on Store Street in Dublin 1, heavily influenced by Le Corbusier, still considered one of the most significant pieces of architectural heritage in the city.

    Busarus in Dublin.

    The one-time architect bemoans how the building is ‘nothing but a departure shed now;’ although the camera identifies the yellow mosaic dome that is easily forgotten in the general hustle and bustle.

    The young architects had imagined a multi-purpose hub of commercial activity and civic interactions. Indeed, there is still a roof-top restaurant space that reminded me of a similar venue in Lisbon, but which, according to Scott, has never been used as anything other than as a staff canteen. Can something be made of this delightful venue in the future?

    In parallel with his architectural career, which he was finally able to walk away from in 1955, once he was able to earn a decent living through selling his art, Patrick Scott was finding his way as a painter. He embraced an array of styles and motifs, including using wet canvasses and whips for brushes, as well as the gold enameling that gives this work an iconic impression, which continues to inspire graphic designers today.

    There is also an important discussion of the White Stag movement in Irish art, which developed among British artists that moved to Ireland in 1930s and 1940s. Basil Rakoczi and Kenneth Hall developed a dynamic focus of energy that had a profound effect on artistic practice in Ireland, including on Scott who joined the group.

    In 1960 Patrick Scott became the first Irish artists in thirty years to have their work exhibited at the Venice Biennale. It is indicative of the status of art, and artists, in Ireland at the time that he had to pay his own way to attend the occasion, as well as for the catalogue and press cuttings. The skill of Doyle’s documentary filmaking is to reveal these kind of details. It might bring consideration to the plight Irish artists today, who contend with a high cost of living and low funding by comparison with other European countries.

    WATCH THE FULL DOCUMENTARY HERE FOR FREE

     

  • ‘Alive Alive O’ Interview with Documentary Filmmaker Sé Merry Doyle

    Sé Merry Doyle’s 2001 documentary film, ‘Alive Alive O – A Requiem For Dublin’ chronicles the lives of Dublin Street Traders. Their patron saint ‘Molly Molone’ became the inspiration for Dublin’s unofficial anthem, ‘Cockles and Mussels, Alive Alive O’. The final stanza remains poignant in our troubled times:

    She died of a fever,
    And no one could save her,
    And that was the end of sweet Molly Malone.
    But her ghost wheels her barrow,
    Through streets broad and narrow,
    Crying, “Cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh!”

    Following the spirit of Molly, the film demonstrates the fragility of a vibrant culture, and with so many closures, including of the Dublin Flea Market which had to shut up shop due to the lack of a venue for its Christmas market last year. This loss of colour and character to the city is incalculable.

    Shot in stages over many years, the documentary contains rare archive footage, capturing the demolition of tenement homes immortalized in the plays of Sean O Casey, as well as vintage shots of U2 in their formative stage as they play an inner–city concert.

    U2 on Sheriff Street. Photo courtesy of Christine Bond.

    There are also disturbing scenes of street traders being harassed by police, and we witness the last day of trading in the Iveagh Market, with one trader opining: ‘whatever happened to Molly Malone and the city’s pride in her’. It also includes an interview with the independent politician Tony Gregory in which he recalls being incarcerated for defending street traders’ rights.

    This is an unprecedented record of the suppression by the State of Dublin’s traditional street traders, the closure of marketplaces, as well as the heroin epidemic that devastated inner city communities in the 1980s. The collection also contains moving recordings of actor Jasmine Russell reading verse especially commissioned from Paula Meehan, now the chair of Poetry Ireland, as well as traditional Dublin ballads sung by musicologist Frank Harte.

    We spoke with Sé (over the phone unfortunately from where he is self-isolating in London). He first describes how he had made his first film in 1982 called Looking On, which is set in the North Inner City against a backdrop of civil strife, and the emergence of a yuppie culture that brought speculators into an area considered ‘ripe’.

    Sé lived in that part of the city for many years himself, before being attracted to the bright lights of London where he blazed a trail for Irish filmmakers. He returned to his native city of Dublin in 1992, once again taking up residence in that part of the city

    He recalls that Tony Gregory had by then won a few battles, especially after he agreed to support Taoiseach Charlie Haughey after the 1987 election, the so-called Haughey-Gregory Pact, in exchange for gaining crucial financial assistance for the inner city in return. Social housing had by then been built, but the persecution of street traders continued unabated.

    Sé also remembers how:

    I saw a pram dealer on Henry Street have her wheels removed by the Gardai. The Dublin Chamber of Commerce were promoting the removal of traders on behalf of the shopping district. Ironically the women who loaded up on produce bought in the fruit and vegetable market would normally go to Dunnes Stores and fill their prams with their own household purchases at the end of the day.

    Then he says:

    A notion came into my head. Here was the city singing ‘Alive Alive O’ at football matches, while at the end of rich Grafton Street there is statue of Molly. My family all come from the Liberties and some had been street traders, and so a new film began that would also use footage from Looking On.

    Sé said he wanted this film to be lyrical, so he brought in Paula Meehan to add poetry and Frank Harte to sing traditional ballads. ‘A highlight,’ he said, was ‘filming the last days trading at the Iveagh Markets’

    Eternally mischievous, Sé reveals how, after the market was closed for the last time, he bribed a security guard to let him back in, and then brought in the old traders to whom he showed old footage of the market to see what would happen. That became the last scene.

    According to Sé, raising the money ‘ was a nightmare. I got a small grant from the Arts Council, then another small amount from the Irish Film Board and eventually RTÉ came on board and the film was born.’

    The film was premiered at the Cork Film Festival in 2001, and won a number of awards, including at the Galway Film Fleadh. In 2009 it was the official representative of Ireland at the Doc Europa Festival in Lisbon, Portugal.

    The Iveagh Market is still closed and mired in controversy. Sé reckons that ‘markets in general are victimised by red tape and speculators wanting their patches. Alive Alive O!’

    To watch the film in full click here.

  • Free Documentary – ‘Patrick Kavanagh -No Man’s Fool’

    In association with The Loopline Collection, we are introducing a free documentary film every week during this period of social isolation for you to enjoy.

    For this St. Patrick’s night we bring you Sé Merry Doyle’s intimate portrait of the poet Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967): ‘Patrick Kavanagh – No Man’s Fool’.

    Kavanagh’s best-known works include the novel Tarry Flynn (1948), and poems such as ‘On Raglan Road’ (1946), immortalised in song by Luke Kelly, and  ’The Great Hunger‘ (1942). His work viscerally conveys the frustrations of Irish rural life in the first half of the century, while grasping at its cosmic possibilities.

    We also find these themes in:

    ‘Stony Grey Soil of Monaghan‘

    O stony grey soil of Monaghan
    The laugh from my love you thieved;
    You took the gay child of my passion
    And gave me your clod-conceived.

    You clogged the feet of my boyhood
    And I believed that my stumble
    Had the poise and stride of Apollo
    And his voice my thick tongued mumble.

    You told me the plough was immortal!
    O green-life conquering plough!
    The mandril stained, your coulter blunted
    In the smooth lea-field of my brow.

    You sang on steaming dunghills
    A song of cowards’ brood,
    You perfumed my clothes with weasel itch,
    You fed me on swinish food

    You flung a ditch on my vision
    Of beauty, love and truth.
    O stony grey soil of Monaghan
    You burgled my bank of youth!

    Lost the long hours of pleasure
    All the women that love young men.
    O can I stilll stroke the monster’s back
    Or write with unpoisoned pen.

    His name in these lonely verses
    Or mention the dark fields where
    The first gay flight of my lyric
    Got caught in a peasant’s prayer.

    Mullahinsa, Drummeril, Black Shanco-
    Wherever I turn I see
    In the stony grey soil of Monaghan
    Dead loves that were born for me.

    In the documentary we find outtakes fleshing out the story with previously-unseen interviews with actor T.P. McKenna, author Dermot Healy, poet John Montague and others close to the poet. There is also a fascinating sequence involving Kavanagh’s brother, Peter on the occasion of the installation of a plaque at Parson’s Bookshop on Baggot Street, sheding light on a controversial relationship. Audio recordings of actor Gerard McSorley’s readings of Kavanagh’s poems, only partially used in the original film, reflect the genius of both actor and poet.

    On location, ‘Patrick Kavanagh – No Man’s Fool’.

    The film was voted Best Documentary by the Boston Film Festival and features a host of writers and actors, and is just over an hour in length.

    Click here to begin viewing.