IFI Irish Film Archive
Maguire and Paterson Matches: Dancing
Duration32s
ProducerBirchall
An advertisement for Cara and Friendly brand matches, featuring animated dancing matchsticks.
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Valley Ice Cream: Big Red
An advertisement for Valley Ice Cream, encouraging people to get their next ice cream pop from ‘the big red fridge’. Featuring all the favourites, including Choc Ice. Valley Ice Cream was based in Thurles, Co Tipperary, and closed in 1997.
Dear Daughter - 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. Dear Daughter was the first televised exposure of the horrific abuse of hundreds of children in Ireland’s industrial schools. Christine Buckley bravely recounts the extent of the atrocities she experienced as a child in Dublin’s Goldenbridge orphanage in this drama-documentary. Born in Dublin, she was the daughter of a married Irish woman and a Nigerian medical student. At the age of three weeks old she was given up to be fostered. Dear Daughter delves into her traumatic childhood at the orphanage and her persistent determination to find her parents. Dear Daughter was one of several television documentaries (including Lentin’s Stolen Lives (1999) and Mary Rafferty’s States of Fear (1999)) which heightened public awareness of institutional abuse, and lead to the commissioning of the Murphy and Ryan reports, which investigated the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic archdiocese of Dublin leading to a full State apology to victims of clerical child abuse by then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern. Dear Daughter was awarded the Creative Excellence Award at the US International Film and TV Festival 1996 and was nominated for Social and Political Documentary, Banff Television Festival, 1996. With kind permission of Dr. Ronit Lentin.
Take Me Swimming
‘The day I don’t know who you are, promise to take me swimming’ – a melancholic promise between a husband and wife as her Alzheimer’s disease progresses. When Thady (Barry Ward) returns to his parents’ home for a neighbour’s wake, he is shocked by his mother’s decline (Olwen Fouéré, also seen in The Wake). Gone is the eloquent artist of the television interviews, and here now is a woman who has lost her capacity to carry out the most mundane tasks and spends her days in a local care centre. When he finds the crumpled promise in the pocket of an old dressing gown, the rest of his visit is spent bitterly resenting his mother’s condition and his father’s stoic acceptance. It is only when his mother goes missing in the middle of the night that he begins to understand how their love transcends her condition. Director Claire Dix and writer Ailbhe Keogan have since collaborated on the feature film Sunlight. This film is part of F-Rated: Short Films by Irish Women.
President of Éire
Large crowds gather on the streets of Dublin as Ireland’s first President, Dr. Douglas Hyde, is installed. This newsreel from 1938 depicts the military procession that leads Douglas Hyde past the Grand Central Cinema and the GPO on O’Connell Street, Dublin to the Phoenix Park where he is to be installed as President of Ireland. When he arrives at Áras an Uachtaráin he is greeted by Eamon de Valera, Prime Minister, and Seán T O’Kelly, Tánaiste who would succeed Hyde as President in 1945. Áras an Uachtaráin was built in 1751 in Phoenix Park, Dublin. It had been acquired for use by the Viceroys who oversaw British rule in Ireland until 1922 but became the President of Ireland’s official home in 1938. This film is part of The Irish Independence Film Collection – The Early Irish Free State that explores facets of Irish society after the War of Independence and up to the birth of the Irish Republic.
John Montague - Imprint: Writer in Profile
John Montague was an Irish poet who was born in Brooklyn, New York, but grew up in Tyrone, Ireland. At the time this programme was made, Montague was Ireland Professor of Poetry at Trinity College, Dublin. In this generous interview, Montague reflects on studying in college where he discovered that ‘there were such things called poets’; living in France during World War II; encountering beat poetry in America; and returning to Cork in the early 1970s. Montague also examines his position as a poet and the 'melancholy' strain in his work. Imprint, a literature review programme, and its sister show Imprint: Writer in Profile screened on RTÉ1 for three seasons. Both were presented by Irish poet, writer and lecturer Theo Dorgan. Over the course of the Writer in Profile series Dorgan conducted extended, in-depth interviews with a wide range of Irish and international writers including Colm Tóibín, Bernard MacLaverty, Jennifer Johnston, Joseph O’Connor, Michael Longley, Doris Lessing, John Montague, Eavan Boland, Gore Vidal, Richard Ford and Margaret Atwood.
Mairéad Farrell: An Unfinished Conversation
This Loopline documentary investigates the life and death of Mairéad Farrell who, in 1988, was shot dead by the SAS in Gibraltar along with two other unarmed members of the IRA. The violent killing of the three was one of the most controversial incidents during the Northern Ireland Troubles and provoked an international outcry. Bríona Nic Dhiarmada, who was writing a book about Farrell at the time of her death, now attempts to contextualise and make sense of her friend’s life and death. She visits Armagh Prison where Farrell was incarcerated and explores her legacy through rare audio interviews, personal memories and conversations with historians, politicians and peers. Due to her youth, her gender and her stature within the IRA, Farrell was quickly subsumed into the pantheon of Irish republican martyrs. However, behind the mythologising and demonisation of Farrell, there was also a real person who was prepared to kill and die for her beliefs.