Ireland’s Great New Harbour

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.

1m 35s

Forgive and Forget

The formation of the Irish Free State “Recalling the King’s noble plea at Belfast for peace, a plea which has at last borne fruit”. This newsreel shows the royal progress from the Belfast docks, up High Street towards City Hall while Black and Tans occupy an armoured vehicle on Thomas Street. King George V used the opening of the Northern Ireland Parliament in June 1921 as an opportunity to appeal for peace, ´to stretch out the hand of forbearance and conciliation, to forgive and forget´. The IRA agreed to a truce a fortnight later on July 11th 1921. This led to talks between the President of the Irish Republic Éamon de Valera and David Lloyd George, and later that year to formal negotiations between Dail Éireann representatives and the British government.

44s

Irish Free State

This newsreel, which is predominately text based, declares that “after centuries of strife, Britain adds a contented New Dominion to the Crown”. The Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed between Irish and British negotiators in London at 10 Downing Street, and would determine the future of 20th century Ireland. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George threatened the Irish with “Immediate and terrible war” should they decide not to accept The Treaty. Michael Collins signed it as he believed it would be either a dominion and peace or a Republic and war. The Treaty was signed at 2.20am on December 6th 1921. Irish delegates seen at the end of the Newsreel, include Mr Arthur Griffith {Left} and R.C Barton {Center}, “agreed to an arrangement whereby all Ireland – except Ulster- becomes a Free State”.

1m 10s

The Outgoing President

In this newsreel the Ministry and members of the Republican Party who opposed the Treaty stand for the camera after contesting the policy of the Free State Party at the elections in 1922. On 14th January 1922 a meeting of the members elected to the House of Commons of Southern Ireland was held at the Mansion House, Dublin. At the meeting the Anglo-Irish Treaty was ratified by the Irish side and a Provisional Government was elected. Michael Collins was appointed its Chairman and the Provisional Government took up office two days later on January 16th 1922 when the British administration handed over Dublin Castle to Collins in person. The Treaty, which would replace the Republic as a dominion of the British Commonwealth, was signed on December 6th. De Valera was not happy with the signing of it as he had stipulated that regardless of the outcome the delegates should not be pressured into any agreements and should return to consult with the cabinet and him, their President. After the Treaty was narrowly ratified, de Valera and a large majority of Sinn Féin T.D.s left Dáil Éireann and Arthur Griffith was elected President.

1m 04s

Women in Focus

Women in Focus is a curated selection of films by five wildly independent female amateur filmmakers: Margaret Currivan; Agnes Heron; Flora Kerrigan; Beres Laidlaw; and Sister Maureen MacMahon. Women's creative work has been under-reported and under-recognised and can be challenging to catalogue due to a lack of recorded primary information. This is exacerbated when dealing with amateur or non-professional filmmaking, where the work of individual women filmmakers has been even more invisible. In 2021, the IFI Film Archive acknowledged a limitation in the IFI Film Archive research resources and put a request out to academic partners to assist in developing new tools that would highlight the work of female filmmakers within the collection. This resulted in a collaborative research project that developed new approaches to cataloguing the creative contribution of women filmmakers in local, regional, and national archives. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Irish Research Council, as part of the UK-Ireland Digital Humanities scheme, the project is a UK-Ireland collaboration between the University of East Anglia, Maynooth University, and the University of Sussex, with the IFI Irish Film Archive and East Anglian Film Archive as archive partners. The project has resulted in the creation of a cataloguing toolkit that helps archives with moving image collections to create clear, relevant, and easily accessible records about female filmmakers. The work presented here formed case studies for the toolkit and was digitised by the IFI Irish Film Archive.  A larger selection of films from the project will be made available on the IFI Archive Player in 2025.

3m 55s

A Day of Drama - 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. This newsreel shows a crowd of people outside Mountjoy Prison in December 1922 in support of, and praying for the hunger striking prisoners. Lord Mayor of Dublin Laurence O'Neill and Maud Gonne McBride stand outside the Mountjoy Prison gates. Between the years of 1913 - 1922 more than 1000 hunger strikes occurred in both England and Ireland. These types of protests were centred on common political issues, with seven people dying during this period as a result, and many more from complications later on.