IFI Irish Film Archive

Clubs are Trumps

Year1959 Duration22m 11s ProducerStuart Hetherington, Brendan Redmond

This short film was made to promote the activities of the Our Lady of Good Counsel Boys Club in Thomas Street, Dublin. In the 1950s Father McGrath, a Dublin-based Augustinian Priest, ran this Boys’ social club in a working class area of Dublin’s inner city. He decided that the production of a short film outlining the activities of the club would be a useful promotional and fundraising tool. Funds to produce the film were secured from the Guinness Brewery whose premises were also in Thomas Street. McGrath approached professional cameramen Stuart Hetherington and Brendan Redmond to make the film and together they produced Clubs Are Trumps. The film had its premiere in the Olympia Theatre one Sunday evening in 1959. Apparently Guinness was so impressed with the club and its role in gainfully occupying the youth of Thomas Street, that they agreed to fund all its future activities. The film shows the boys engaged in wholesome sporting and leisure activities in the club and a discussion, hosted by Fr McGrath, on topics of relevance to the boys. From Marshalsea Barracks, where the club was originally located, to Thomas St and The Liberties (by day and by night) the film is rich in its record of not-often-seen Dublin city locations. With kind permission from Stuart Hetherington.

Our second IFI Filmmaker Playlist is curated by filmmaker and visual artist Trish McAdam. Since the production of her early shorts in the 1980s, Trish has created a vibrant and varied body of work, embracing a range of forms and subjects and retaining a singular, independent voice. We're delighted to welcome Trish to the Irish Film Institute to select her top picks from films preserved in the IFI Irish Film Archive and presented on the IFI Archive Player. November 1961 and students from Trinity College marched the main streets of Dublin in protest at nuclear bomb testing. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, CND, was established in the UK in 1958 in the wake of widespread fear of conflict and the effects of nuclear testing. CND quickly grew with branches in Scotland, Wales and Ireland. This newsreel recorded Irish student protesters as they marched in Dublin from St. Stephens Green to the Ambassador Theatre on O’Connell Street. Their placards demanded 'Ban the Bomb' and called for world peace. Produced by Gael Linn, Amharc Éireann (A View of Ireland) is Ireland’s longest-running indigenous newsreel series. It was distributed to cinemas throughout the country to promote the Irish language. The first 36 issues were produced as single-topic films which were released monthly, followed in 1959 by weekly, multi-story newsreels featuring a broad range of topics, from hard news stories to lighter magazine-style items. Between 1956 and 1964, 267 editions of the newsreel were produced for cinema exhibition. With kind permission of Gael Linn.

14m 31s

Come Back to Erin - Trish McAdam Filmmaker Playlist

Our second IFI Filmmaker Playlist is curated by filmmaker and visual artist Trish McAdam. Since the production of her early shorts in the 1980s, Trish has created a vibrant and varied body of work, embracing a range of forms and subjects and retaining a singular, independent voice. We're delighted to welcome Trish to the Irish Film Institute to select her top picks from films preserved in the IFI Irish Film Archive and presented on the IFI Archive Player. Only one reel of this three-reel film has survived the ravages of time and so the tale is incomplete – but worth watching nonetheless. In this transatlantic tale, feisty young Peggy O’Malley (Gene Gauntier) refuses her father's orders to marry Jerry, the village blacksmith and runs away to New York City via steam-liner. Upon landing in New York she gets a job working as a parlour maid in the home of wealthy Mrs Mortimer. The film includes striking documentary-like elements in scenes set in Ireland – at the cattle market in Killarney and scenes of the emigrant ship leaving Queenstown (now Cobh) for America. This is all that survives of the film. Contemporaneous reviews fill in the remaining story : It’s not long before Peggy falls into a bad crowd and soon finds herself arrested for a crime she didn’t commit. With the news of Peggy’s arrest having made its way back home, will her blacksmith in shining armour come to save her from her wrongful imprisonment and take her back to Ireland? A single reel of this 3 reel film was discovered in the Museum of Modern Art following research by IFI in preparation for a major retrospective of Irish cinema in MOMA in 2011.

3m 17s

The Loopline Collection Featurette

Loopline Films is an independent production company established in 1992 by award-winning filmmaker Sé Merry Doyle. Since its foundation, Loopline has been at the heart of Irish independent broadcasting creating a wealth of important and diverse material on topics such as folklife, ethnology, architecture, art, literature and inner city life. The subjects explored by Loopline were chosen by Merry Doyle for their cultural and social importance. This first tranche of the Loopline Collection covers key areas of Irish history and arts, and contains a unique wealth of stunning images revealing everyday Irish society in urban settings. The focus of the filmmaker is on national identity in a changing world and Sé Merry Doyle set up Loopline Film with the specific intention of making creative documentaries that would endure and stand the test of time. The breadth of the collection is evident in the diversity of its content: The Folklife footage captures the last living moments of many traditional rural ways of life before mass production and consumerism led to their demise. The material covers traditional farming methods, boatbuilding, weaving, fishing, thatching, wheelwright, and spiritual customs. The collection contains a large quantity of urban material that chronicles the changing landscape of Dublin, its buildings and its citizen’s ways of life. The films include such historically resonant images as the clearance of slums, the closure of traditional markets, and tragic accounts of young teenagers dying from the heroin epidemic of the early 90’s. Portraits of artists, architects, writers and poets are also a cornerstone of the collection with riveting interviews with the very best artistic talent in the country. Patrick Kavanagh, John Montague, Hugh Leonard, James Gandon, Jennifer Johnston, Doris Lessing, John Henry Foley, Eavan Boland, Brendan Kennelly and Joseph O’Connor are but a fraction of those featured.

30m 47s

Statistic - Trish McAdam Filmmaker Playlist

Our second IFI Filmmaker Playlist is curated by filmmaker and visual artist Trish McAdam. Since the production of her early shorts in the 1980s, Trish has created a vibrant and varied body of work, embracing a range of forms and subjects and retaining a singular, independent voice. We're delighted to welcome Trish to the Irish Film Institute to select her top picks from films preserved in the IFI Irish Film Archive and presented on the IFI Archive Player. ‘Who needs a pregnant waitress?’ is just one of the questions that fills Ellie Connolly’s mind when she discovers she is pregnant in 1980s Ireland. Statistic was made by film student Alison Kelly in 1983, the year which saw the passing of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution Act (which effectively criminalised abortion in most circumstances). Ellie (Edel McCrann) is pregnant as “the result of a drunken screw between two people who hardly knew each other”.  She broods in her flat and discusses her predicament with her good friend Anne – she must tell her boyfriend Paul but she knows ’In the end it’s inside me, not him’.  She finds information in a magazine about abortion services in the UK and Anne accompanies her to the ferry – following the footsteps of the many women before her. Statistic is invaluable as a contemporaneous response to events in 1983 – the film includes newspaper headlines and filmed sequences of pro and anti-abortion marches and dramatizes the plight of a young woman dealing with a crisis pregnancy. It is also a vivid record of the sights and sounds of Dublin in the 1980s  - not least in the colourful cameos from mime artist Raymond Keane and indie band The Cuba Dares.

7m 04s

Republican Loans

In 1919, on the block where Robert Emmet was executed, Michael Collins read a letter from Michael Fogarty, Bishop of Killaloe, pledging financial support to the new self-declared Irish Republic. Filmed at St. Enda’s College in Rathfarnham, (the school founded by Patrick Pearse in 1908), this remarkable film shows Michael Collins, the Irish Government’s Minister for Finance, inviting various prominent Republicans to purchase bonds to help finance the new Republic. Bonds are purchased by 30 named figures, Republicans and survivors of executed 1916 leaders. They include: Arthur Griffith; Eoin MacNeill; Erskine Childers; William Cosgrave; the widows of Eamonn Ceannt, Tom Clarke, the O Rahilly, Joseph Plunkett, and the mother and sister of Patrick Pearse. The film was made during an interlude in the making of Willy Reilly and his Colleen Bawn, a feature- length drama directed by John MacDonagh, which was released the following year. The film played an instrumental role in the success of the Republican Loans campaign. Director John MacDonagh, brother of the executed 1916 leader Thomas MacDonagh (a teacher in St Enda’s) , once said, “in those dangerous and exciting times, no cinema owner would dare risk exhibiting the Republican Loans film so it was planned for a few volunteers in fast cars to visit certain cinemas, rush the operator’s box, and, at gun-point, force the operator to take off the film he was showing, and put on the Loan film”.

1m 07s

Further Pictures of Irish Peace

This newsreel depicts the immediate aftermath of the Anglo-Irish Peace Treaty on December 6th 1921, showing the release of 1,700 internees from Ballykinlar internment camp. In the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, November 21st 1920, the British authorities arrested hundreds of republicans and opened several internment camps throughout Ireland. The first internment camp was this one at Ballykinlar, in Co. Down, while the volume of arrests was so great that additional camps had to be established at Gormanstown, Co. Dublin; Bere Island and Spike Island, Co. Cork; and at the Curragh, in Co. Kildare. Opened in December 1920 Ballykinlar Camp was situated on the Co. Down coast at the mouth of Dundrum Bay, about three miles from Dundrum village between Downpatrick and Newcastle. Over the following year 2,000 men were interned at Ballykinlar.Three days later after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, on December 9th 1921, all Republican prisoners were released from Ballykinlar. Three special trains brought the men to Dublin, from where the internees made their own way to their home Counties. The trains were attacked by loyalist mobs with gunfire, bricks and stones at several locations. The Leinster Leader however on, December 17th 1921, reported on the release of the Ballykinlar and Curragh Camp internees, remarking that the reception in Athy was ‘a very warmhearted one’.