Faith & begorrah, happy St Patrick's Day!
All things Irish this week & we are spoiled for choice
The big day has arrived - I have been looking forward to it with a mix of excitement and dread. Excitement because there are so many brilliant Irish stories to rave about and dread because there are so many brilliant Irish stories to rave about…that whittling down the list has been gut-wrenching. But it is an annual event so there’s always next year I guess.
In Ireland there is an ancient tradition of ‘seanchaí’ (pronounced ‘shannakey’), storytellers to the chieftains & their clans who kept track of family histories as well as entertaining and passing on their huge collections of tales without anything ever being written down. Ah, a life lived without a smartphone. Or a TV.
And this tradition of excellence in storytelling carries on in Ireland to this day.
Unless you’ve been living under a very large rock, you’ll have heard of Marian Keyes and her extensive oeuvre. If you are looking to acquaint yourself with Keyes or perhaps to revisit her work, her series of books about the Walsh sisters is currently in the works as a TV show with filming happening in Ireland now, so get (re-)reading .
Then there’s Sharon Horgan - who has in various roles - brought us Catastrophe, Motherland and, of course, Bad Sisters. And we cannot overlook Lisa McGee’s incomparable Derry Girls, and further back Father Ted. See also: Edna O’Brien, John Banville, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Maeve Binchy, Neil Jordan, Jim Sheridan, Tana French, Seamus Heaney, Brendan Behan, Bram Stoker, Anne Enright, George Bernard Shaw, Jonathan Swift… There’s a few, is my point.
Dear world, you’re welcome.
So today some stories you might have missed or forgotten, as ever.
TL;DR
Watch Moone Boy and London Irish; read The Glorious Heresies and Kala; listen to We’re Not Fucking Historians and Documentary on One; watch Intermission, The Barrytown Trilogy (The Commitments, The Snapper & The Van) and if you can stand the lack of HD The Last of the High Kings.
WATCH
Chris O’Dowd - him of Bridesmaids and being-married-to-Dawn-Porter fame - created and starred in Moone Boy, a quirky comedy set in Boyle, Co. Roscommon in the west of Ireland.
It’s the late 80s/early 90s when we meet Martin Moone a twelve year old boy with an invisible friend called Seán Murphy, played by O’Dowd, slightly distracted parents and a trio of older sisters who find him annoying. Martin is a little different and comes up with all sorts of hare-brained schemes and it’s Seán’s job to try to talk some sense into him. It’s heartwarming and hilarious and a great reminder of how weird we all were in school.
As mentioned previously Lisa McGee’s brilliant brain brought us the phenomenon that was Derry Girls. A few years prior, that same brain devised London Irish. There’s only one series with six episodes. It’s the story of four Northern Irish absolute head-the-balls living in London, drinking far too much and, well, that is pretty much it. Having heard about it years ago, I missed it when it was first broadcast but then I read that McGee had written it so I dived straight in and it was so worth it.
There’s Bronagh (who many of you will recognise as Sinéad Keenan who plays DCI Jessica James on ITV’s cold case hit series Unforgotten - aka Nicola Walker’s replacement) who is angry to be living with her brother, Conor, in constant desperate need of a drink & a smoke and hugely inventive with her swearing. Her brother Conor is a foreshadowing of the mad cousin Orla in Derry Girls - he is constantly coming out with complete non-sequitur one-liners and doing absolutely mad shit.
Niamh is a schoolfriend of Bronagh’s and she is definitely a prototype for Derry Girls’ mad Aunt Sarah. The quartet is rounded off by Packy (before anyone accuses me of using a racial slur, it’s one diminution of ‘Patrick’ in Ireland) played by Peter Campion aka the priest with the really good hair, also from Derry Girls.
The two lads lose their accents a bit at times and Ardal O’Hanlon (who plays Bronagh & Conor’s da) is also somewhat questionable with the accent himself. But the writing is so much fun - there are some killer one liners - as you can see McGee’s voice developing into what would become the epic Derry Girls and when it finished I must admit, I was annoyed there are so few episodes.
READ
When Kala by Colin Walsh was published, I inhaled it in a matter of hours and then instructed anyone who would listen to read it immediately.
Set in the fictional town of Kinlough on the west coast of Ireland, Kala is told from three different perspectives: Helen, Joe and Mush, who have been friends since school. Kala Lannan was also in their group until the day she disappeared without a trace. Helen and Joe moved away but are now back in town, human remains have been found and two more girls then go missing, bringing everything to a head. Who knows what happened to Kala and are the remains hers?
The Glorious Heresies by Lisa McInerney (it’s probably important to mention that we are not related) came out back in 2015 and was borne out of McInerney’s blog ‘Arse End of Ireland’ as she wrote about life in Ireland after the credit crunch.
It kicks off with fifteen year old drug dealer Ryan preparing to have sex with his girlfriend for the first time and kicks off with Maureen accidentally killing an intruder with a Holy Stone. Maureen calls her son Jimmy - who just so happens to be a psychopathic gangster - for help who in turns orders Tony - who just so happens to be Ryan’s dad - to dispose of the corpse. It’s a bleak but definitely funny portrayal of life in post-credit-crunch Ireland.
LISTEN
And now for something a bit different. Want to learn a little something about Ireland but be entertained at the same time? Then try We’re Not Fucking Historians.
Hosted by director Hazel Hayes and comedian Shane Todd the show takes you through everything from St Valentine to Viking rule in Ireland as well as the history of leprechauns. The show came to an end a few years ago but the episodes are timeless so what are you waiting for, go learn about Anne Bonny, the Cork-born pirate who ruled the Caribbean!
Documentary on One from RTE (Raidió Telifís na hÉireann - Ireland’s state broadcaster) will be nothing new to Irish listeners but to the rest of you it’s like This American Life from NPR mixed with BBC Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent. I’ve learned about tankers sinking, Ireland’s incel community and why a guy called Frank Stagg had three funerals. The team also produce mini-series which run for several episodes focussed on a particular topic (usually in the vein of true crime); the current offering is called Where is Jón? which tells the story of Icelander Jón Jonsson who vanished whilst visiting Dublin in 2019.
WATCH
In the last few years, there have been quite a few Irish films making headlines for both good and bad reasons. The Banshees of Inisherin brought Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson back together as two pals living on a fictional island off the west coast of Ireland: good. Wild Mountain Thyme was so heinous as to make me hate Christopher Walken and I would have thought it likely the Irish government may have considered preventing Jamie Dornan from entering the country ever again due to his involvement in it…but there are plenty of old classics that us Irish saw growing up which may have passed by most people outside of Ireland.
First up: Intermission. This brings you not just a skinhead Colin Farrell but also the legend that is Colm Meaney playing a cop who is devoted to Celtic mysticism, Cillian Murphy dealing with heartbreak and a tip on how to make a cup of tea tastier (I wouldn’t advise trying it)
It’s a dark comedy about crime, cock-ups and rather shit car chases in a Toyota Avensis - a great one for the Sunday night takeaway on the sofa.
Roddy Doyle is another of Ireland’s great writers and thoroughly deserving of a spot in that list I reeled off at the beginning - but I didn’t want to repeat myself. In print there are four books in his Barrytown series; but in film there are only three: the Barrytown Trilogy. I’ve no doubt many of you will have heard of the first in the series, The Commitments. It was a massive hit on release in 1991 and its soundtrack was a huge success going platinum in six countries and selling more than two million copies in the United States alone.
It’s about a group of soul musicians forming a band in Dublin city in the early 90s when the city was nowhere near the international sparkling metropolis it currently is. They play hits from the likes of Al Green, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett. The film follows them as they do their best to book gigs, rehearse and generally all fall out with each other.
Less well known (outside of Ireland at least) are the two later films: The Snapper and The Van.
The Snapper stars Tina Kellegher (who people might remember from Ballykissangel - that huge BBC hit, also from the ‘90s. I really want to know who the hell came up with that name) as young Sharon Curley who finds herself up the duff after a big night out at the pub. This being good Catholic Ireland, there is absolute consternation amongst her family and the whole neighbourhood when they all find out and & she decides to keep the snapper (…the baby, in case you haven’t twigged that quite yet).
Her father Des - played so wonderfully by Colm Meaney (yes, between he & Brendan Gleeson, they must be in everything ever made in Ireland. It’s in legislation I’m sure) - undergoes a truly epiphanical journey from murderous rage towards the father to a renaissance man who learns all about pregnancy and what it does to women, supporting his daughter in any way he can. To say this would have been a rarity back then could well be the understatement of the year. It’s a wonderful portrait of family life in Dublin at a time when Ireland wasn’t all shiny and successful and gentrified as well as a tale of urban family life that isn’t focussed on misery and despair. (Before watching it I would advise bearing in mind the time when it was made…as plenty of its contents are now wholly cancellable offences & don’t even get me started on the father of the baby…)
The final film in the trilogy is often seen as the weakest, but it’s fun nonetheless & always nice to remember World Cup 1990 when Ireland reached the quarter finals for the first & only time. In this instalment, Colm Meaney (told you so) buys a fish & chip van with the money he gets from being made redundant, hires his best mate to work with him & chaos ensues.
The Van has a hilarious trailer which teams up the delightful antics from the movie with that guy who voiced all the trailers in thirty years ago, never mind that he’s American and it’s completely jarring that this voice is talking about two middle aged fellas from north Dublin selling chips as opposed to narrating some sweeping epic about the Americans saving Planet Earth. See below:
Finally, if you want something completely different, try The Last of the High Kings. It will never appear on any “Best Irish Film” lists but if you want to see Jared Leto (seriously) playing an Irish teenager in 1970s Dublin with Gabriel Byrne and Catherine O’Hara (yes, Moira Rose from Schitts Creek) as his parents and with Christina Ricci popping up in a ‘coming of age’ tale, then this is for you. The accents will make us Irish squirm at times and the idea that Howth in north County Dublin is that sunny & warm is also questionable, but it’s from the “Now & Then” school of modern-ish period piece in that it’s a fun feel-good film.