Keywords

For much of the twentieth century, Ireland on screen was defined to an overwhelming extent by foreign directors and perspectives. Within the oppressive context of early twentieth-century Ireland, film was viewed with suspicion by the establishment, evident in the restrictive Censorship of Films Act enacted in 1923, one of the first pieces of legislation passed by the newly independent Dáil Éireann (parliament) of the Irish Free State. As a result, the employment of film as a critical tool to examine Irish society and culture was slow to develop. Rather, film was an important part of the popular cultural context that sustained prevailing conceptions of Irishness and the position of moral authorities (above all the Catholic Church) within Irish society, evident in particular in the sympathetic portrayals found repeatedly of the Irish priest, one of the most recognisable Irish stereotypes in the cinema. This chapter examines Irish cinema in the first half of the twentieth century in light of the existence of what contemporary criticism has termed Ireland’s “architecture of containment” (Smith 2001) and framed with regard to Antonio Gramsci’s conception of hegemony and “common sense” (1971). It considers Peter Lennon’s 1967 documentary Rocky Road to Dublin as a key text in identifying the “self-interested silence”—in the words of Seán Ó Faoláin when interviewed in Rock Road to Dublin (0:03:41)—that has prevailed well into our contemporary moment with regard to clerical control in Ireland, the structures that maintained that silence and the film’s important role in providing one of the first forums for that silence to be broken.

The question may be posed: why include a consideration of documentary in a collection concerned primarily with Narratives of the Unspoken? Firstly, the documentary considered, Rocky Road to Dublin, was a critical and groundbreaking film text in beginning the process of critical examination through film of various “silences” that had long been a feature of Irish society and culture and features Irish writers prominently. Indeed, the documentary begins with an interview with Irish writer Sean Ó Faoláin in which he identifies the “self-interested silence” (0:03:41) of the privileged and powerful (including members of the clergy), contending that this has contributed to the emergence of a “society of urbanised peasants”, a society Ó Faoláin describes as “without moral courage (…) never speaking in moments of crisis, and in constant alliance with a obscurantist, repressive, regressive and uncultivated church” (0:03:48–52). Furthermore, it is a hugely revealing documentary with regard to the very silences that are explored by other contributors to this collection, at a time in which the structures responsible for such repression continued to be very much in place. In its revelatory examination of the role of the Catholic Church, in particular in a period in which the church continued to have huge power and influence in matters of education, healthcare and the control of both Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby homes, the documentary provides an illuminating context for understanding how such silences were allowed to endure, while pointing all the more to the importance of the breaking of such silences within contemporary Irish fiction.

In addition, the importance of the engagement of contemporary fiction with such silences is very evident in the analysis Rocky Road to Dublin provides of the silencing of fiction itself in Ireland, through the repressive censorship regime imposed on Irish writers prior to and during the period in which the film was made. This is evident in the long list of major works banned at the time and listed in the documentary—each accompanied by the toll of a church bell! (0:35:00–40). Several major Irish writers are also referred to or featured, including W.B. Yeats, Sean O’Casey, Seán Ó Faolain and John McGahern, who was forced from his teaching position and the subject of huge criticism as a result of the “silences” he broke in the 1960s through his writing. In particular, the documentary addresses the banning of McGahern’s 1965 novel The Dark (0:32:10–30), a work that focuses frankly on the emerging sexuality of an adolescent, a topic still considered taboo in Ireland of the 1960s. In its critical excavation of Irish society, Rocky Road to Dublin anticipated and provided inspiration for subsequent documentary and fiction work that engaged critically with the church’s role in Ireland.

From the mid-1990s onwards, a range of television and film work emerged in Ireland and internationally engaging critically with the legacy of the Catholic Church’s power and influence in Ireland. Documentaries like Dear Daughter (Lenten, RTÉ 1996) and States of Fear (Raftery, RTÉ 1999), and feature films including The Butcher Boy (Jordan 1996), A Love Divided (McCartney 1999), The Magdalene Sisters (Mullen 2002) and Song for a Raggy Boy (Walsh 2003) provided critical and often deeply unsettling portrayals of Irish society, breaking silences concerning past injustices often facilitated and enacted by members of the Catholic Church and Catholic institutions. These works provided the context for the rerelease of Rocky Road to Dublin, which was reissued on DVD in 2005. While the film was very positively received on rerelease in 2005 (see for example Bradshaw 2005; Gibbons 2006), it was in stark contrast to its reception on initial release. As Lennon has recalled:

The Irish establishment took one, brief look at Rocky Road, and suffocated it for 37 years. No Irish cinema would screen it and there was never any question that RTÉ (Irish public service television) would either. RTÉ was totally submissive to the church (as were most Irish politicians). Indeed, at the point where only about 18 people had seen it at a private screening, RTÉ, on its Late Late Show, dealt the hammer blow by warning the nation that this unseen film was backed by “communist money.” In fact, it was entirely funded by an American businessman friend of mine. (2005, 6)

In considering this film, I want to underline its importance by placing it in the context of the initial reception of cinema in Ireland, and the subsequent depiction of members of the clergy prior to (and immediately following) the documentary’s release. This context is important, I believe, for understanding how the power, position and authority of the Catholic Church was normalised and naturalised in the early to mid-twentieth century, with film having an important role to play in this process.

In approaching this topic—and the place of film and the Catholic Church within Irish society—I am informed by the work of Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci, particularly his ideas of both “hegemony” and “common sense”. For Gramsci a fundamental aim of a State is “to raise the great mass of the population to a particular cultural and moral level, a level (or type) which corresponds to the needs of the productive forces for development, and hence to the interests of the ruling class” (1971, 258). A crucial term in this respect for Gramsci was “hegemony”, which refers to the maintenance of control of one social class over others through the diffusion of a complete system of beliefs, ethics, values and ways of thinking throughout particular societies that ultimately becomes the “organising principle” that supports the existing power structures (1971, 258). These ideas on all aspects of life ultimately work to support the ruling elite and become accepted as the prevailing “common sense” defined in Gramsci’s words as “the traditional popular conception of the world—what is unimaginatively called ‘instinct’, although it too is in fact a primitive and elementary historical acquisition” (199). For Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Gramsci’s use of this term describes “the way a subordinate class lives its subordination” (cited in Alvarado and Boyd-Barrett 1992, 51).

In Ireland the prevailing “common sense” was hugely informed and affirmed by the authority held by the Catholic Church, ensured by the church’s control of education in particular but also through the close associations of the clergy with the political class post-independence, a matter addressed (as we will consider shortly) within Rocky Road to Dublin. This “common sense” dictated a range of value judgements and prejudices (particularly with regard to sexuality) that was part of a larger project to maintain what James Smith has called an “architecture of containment” in a context where

Creating and maintaining Ireland’s national identity necessitated the formation of a narrative selective in what it chose to remember and who it chose to forget. Given the conservative Catholic nativism of post-independence Ireland, the construction of a plot to reflect national identity—the official story of what “we” are—did not incorporate, for example, illegitimate children, unmarried mothers, and residents of industrial and reformatory schools. Such an exclusionary narrative permeated both the modes of discourse by which the nation-state maintained its architecture of containment and the hegemonic forces fostering a conspiracy of silence regarding Ireland’s restrictive moral culture. (Smith 2001, 116)

Perhaps one of the most evocative articulations of this “official story of what ‘we’ are” was the much-quoted public address of then Taoiseach Éamon de Valera to the nation on St. Patrick’s day, 1943:

That Ireland which we dreamed of would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis of right living, of a people who were satisfied with frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit; a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with sounds of industry, the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths, the laughter of comely maidens; whose firesides would be the forums of the wisdom of serene old age. (cited in Carlson 1990, 9)

De Valera’s St. Patrick’s Day address, however, is silent regarding disturbing and traumatic domestic realities in the period in which it was broadcast, including a horrific fire at St. Joseph’s Orphanage & Industrial School in Cavan town, run by the enclosed contemplative Catholic order of nuns the Poor Clares. On 23 February 1943—three weeks before de Valera’s St. Patrick’s speech was made—a fire ripped through the school leading to the death of thirty-five young girls. A recurring claim in reports regarding this tragic event was that the evacuation of the young girls was delayed due to concerns among the nuns that it would not be “decent” for them to be seen in public in their nightgowns (Tallant 2006; Ní Aodha 2018).

In the restrictive and secretive context of early twentieth-century Ireland, cinema was viewed with considerable suspicion by both church and state. Prior to independence, the increasing popularity of cinema attracted strong criticism from leading commentators, evident in the following extract from an article published in the Jesuit journal Studies in 1918:

All epoch-making inventions—railway facilities, telegraphy and the like—which have broken down the barriers of time and space and served to bring alien races into contact, have by the same means tended to rob other nations of their salutary isolation (…) we have to ask ourselves whether we are not paying some hidden and undeclared price for the pleasure and instruction afforded by the Modern Picture House. It has brought into our midst vivid representations of the manners and lives of other nations (…) Better remain in our ignorance, better not to know the machinery of other lands, better to be content with our own innocent mirth than to participate in the cosmopolitan gaiety of sin. (Ryan 1918, 112)

The Catholic Church maintained a powerful role in Ireland post-independence, as the moral arbiter for the new state, but also with considerable influence in matters of education, health and in the administration of homes for orphans and girls of alleged ill-repute. The church also had influence with regard to the cinema and lobbied heavily post-independence for considerable restrictions on film (a further silencing of sorts) following independence evident in one of the first pieces of legislation passed by the newly formed Dáil Eireann in 1923, the Censorship of Films Act, some six years before an equivalent Censorship of Publications Act was passed. In both the wording of this act and the remarks of first film censor, James Montgomery, it was clear that morality and religious concerns were to the fore in considerations of films in the period. The Act allowed the censor to deem a film “unfit for general exhibition in public by reason of its being indecent, obscene or blasphemous or because the exhibition thereof in public would tend to inculcate principles contrary to public morality or would be otherwise subversive of public morality” (Dáil Éireann 1923, 7.2). Montgomery admitted to knowing very little about film following his appointment, but stated that his knowledge of the Ten Commandments was sufficient to carry out his duties, which resulted in the banning of 124 films (and cutting of a further 166) in his first year alone (Dwyer 2008).

Even in its much-censored form, film nonetheless had an important role to play in normalising the structures that maintained this architecture of control, particularly through the positive and powerful images of the Catholic priest repeatedly depicted as the moral arbiter and centre of film narratives. The Irish—or Irish-American—Catholic priest became established in the early twentieth century as a leading Irish stereotype in Hollywood cinema, evident in such seminal and influential films as Angels with Dirty Faces (Curtiz 1938) and Boys Town (Taurog 1938) and continuing into the 1970s and beyond, including in David Lean’s Oscar-winning epic Ryan’s Daughter (Lean 1970) in which the local parish priest Father Collins is prominently featured. John Ford’s The Quiet Man (Ford 1952), perhaps the most influential of all depictions of Ireland internationally, is narrated by a further parish priest Fr. Lonergan, who is also central to the plot and its resolution. In all of these films, the Catholic priest provides the moral centre to the film’s narrative.

Though slow to develop post-independence (with a few notable exceptions including Irish Destiny (Dewhurst 1926) and The Dawn (Cooper 1936)), an indigenous film culture did eventually begin to coalesce from the mid-1940s onwards. By this time the Catholic Church’s position towards cinema had evolved, particularly following the 1936 papal encyclical, “Vigilanti Cura”, and the desire expressed by Pope Pius XI that the medium of cinema be put to the “services of human morality” (Pope Pius 1936). Inspired by these sentiments, the National Film Institute of Ireland (NFI) was founded in 1943 (and officially incorporated in 1945), under the patronage of Dr John Charles McQuaid, Archbishop of Dublin. Under the institute’s influence, indigenous film productions between the 1940s and 1960s continued to be a powerful vehicle affirming the church’s authority in Ireland as evident in some of the NFI’s most popular productions.

Among the most popular films produced by the NFI were highlights packages of All-Ireland finals produced from 1948 onwards. The status and position of the church is very evident in these films, with religious figures featured frequently—it was the practice until the late 1960s that major Gaelic games would be started by the throwing in of either the football or sliotar (in hurling) by a bishop and these moments are featured prominently in these films. We also witness in several films the ceremonial kneeling to kiss the bishop’s ring by the team captains, a practice that preceded the start of most games. This foregrounding of religious figures (and affirmation of their exalted position and moral authority) would continue in newsreels (Amharc Éireann) and documentaries produced by the Irish language organisation Gael Linn between 1956 and 1964 (Crosson 2019, 101–138).

It was in this context that Peter Lennon wrote, directed and released his documentary Rocky Road to Dublin. While Lennon’s film may have anticipated the critically engaged indigenous fiction filmmaking of the 1970s, it was also a film that was in many respects ahead of its time in challenging the prevailing “common sense” and “architecture of containment” maintained by the Catholic Church, particularly in the film’s interrogation of the church’s role, and control, in Ireland. As such, the film was released, as indicated already, within a society unprepared for its critical examination. Lennon could not get a distributor for the production and it was heavily criticised at the time of its release in Ireland by press and religious figures (Lennon 2004). However outside of Ireland Rocky Road to Dublin was received very positively and was a considerable success at the Cannes Film Festival where its central question (articulated by Lennon in his opening Voice-Over), “What do you do with your revolution once you’ve got it?” (0.03:09–12) chimed with those engaged in protests in France in 1968 (Eisen 2018). The film was selected as one of the official entries for the prestigious Critics’ Week section of Cannes, but was also the final film screened at the Festival before it was closed prematurely in support of the student protests occurring across France at that time (May 1968). The film was subsequently screened repeatedly throughout France and drew large and sympathetic audiences who responded to its central message. As noted by Erica X. Eisen,

Lennon’s account of how the potential of a country’s socialism-inspired revolution could be squandered as power gradually amassed in the hands of the establishment resonated with the demonstrators. Striking Renault workers and Sorbonne students screened the film in occupied lecture halls. The Irish documentary’s unlikely following among the French Left soon caught the attention of the international media, and Rocky Road’s surprise success abroad became a profound embarrassment for those seeking to suppress it at home. (2018)

The documentary returns repeatedly to the Catholic Church’s close connection with Irish political figures, including former and current Taoisigh Seán LeMass and Jack Lynch and then President Éamon de Valera, which Lennon describes in the film as “not so much a villainous conspiracy as a bad habit” as he interrogates the damaging impact this relationship has had on Irish society (0:45:30–40). It is this problematic relationship, Lennon contends, which provides the context for ongoing injustices in Irish society. As already noted, among the injustices (or what Ó Faoláin describes as “self-interested silence”) that the documentary identifies and examines prominently is the operation of censorship in Ireland. Theatre director and producer Jim Fitzgerald discusses his experience of censorship and condemnation by the Catholic Church for his views as a communist, condemnation that ensured he could not get employment in Ireland for a considerable period of time. As Fitzgerald remarks in the documentary:

As a young communist twelve years ago the church was able, by using a paper called The Catholic Standard, to completely destroy any opportunity for employment for me or any other communist of the time. I recall an incident when the front page of… The Catholic Standard carried a large statement and a photograph of me saying “this man is dangerous”. (0:33:03–33)

A further aspect to the documentary is the silencing of women, evident in the very limited number of female voices heard (until the final anonymous interviewee discussed below) within the production. In an item featuring students in Trinity College Dublin, the silencing of women is (perhaps unintentionally) apparent in the person of the one woman featured in the group of students who is unable to contribute to the discussion, despite several efforts to do so. The debate is dominated by her male counterparts who criticise the narrow and biased range of perspectives in the Irish print media not realising they themselves were enacting similar exclusionary practices as they spoke (01:27:28–01:30:14).

The marginalisation and oppression of women, particularly with regard to the severe regulation of women’s bodies, is also evident in the discussion of the ongoing ban on contraception. Irish Times editor Douglas Gageby describes in one sequence the increased articles and correspondence his paper carried on this issue (01:26:29–01:27:28) while the particularly challenging circumstances some married women encountered due to the ban on contraception is addressed in the final moving interview featured with an anonymous young married woman (to which we will return later in this chapter).

The criticism that Rocky Road to Dublin delivers of Irish society functions and is realised within the film on three principal levels. Structurally, the film is built around interviews with leading figures in Irish life including writer Seán Ó Faoláin, politician Conor Cruise O’Brien, Douglas Gageby, Jim Fitzgerald, a member of the Censorship of Publications Appeals Board, Professor Liam O’Briain, GAA Executive Officer Brendan Mac Lua and others. In these interviews, as Lennon notes, “Irish society condemns itself out of its own mouth” (Lennon 2004) as the documentary critically engaged with central institutions and aspects of Irish life, including the church, state, education and sport.

A second mode through which the film communicates its critique is via Lennon’s own acerbic and (when present) highly critical voice over. As described by Lennon in his introductory remarks in the documentary, the film is a “personal attempt to reconstruct with a camera the plight of an island community which survived more than 700 years of English occupation, and then nearly sank under the weight of its own heroes and clergy” (00:01:40–52). Lennon vocally and directly critiques the church’s role in Ireland describing in his voice-over the “well behaved gratitude” (00:05:15–16) and “heroic obedience” (00:05:33–34) Irish people are expected to demonstrate towards the church in a context where “women have to wait patiently for the men” (01:40:06–08). Lennon’s comments here in the film’s opening sequence describe evocatively the “common sense” expectations of Irish society post-independence that were key to maintaining the “architecture of containment” described earlier in this chapter.

Finally, there is a third aspect to how the film communicates its critique and that is the distinctive cinematography produced by leading French Nouvelle Vague DOP Roaul Coutard. This is particularly apparent in what is perhaps the most revelatory section of the film when Lennon follows Fr. Michael Cleary for a day. As Lennon remarked some years later:

Reinforcing the claim that the church was “uncultivated”, the Archbishop of Dublin, never realizing that the camera could be used as a weapon, lent me an idiotic singing and dancing priest who warbles the Chattanooga Shoe Shine Boy to women in a tuberculosis hospital. Long after the same priest delivered a homily to camera on the desirability of celibacy, we discovered he was sleeping with his young housekeeper, an orphan who had herself been a victim of earlier sexual abuse. Venal as well as idiotic. (2005, 7)

I wish to explore further here this idea Lennon articulates of how the “camera could be used as a weapon” in his film. Isabelle Le Corff has identified how the cinematography of Rocky Road to Dublin provides a further layer of narration revealing a divided and conflicted body in its depiction of Michael Cleary—in particular in the scene in the tuberculosis hospital Lennon refers to above. As Le Corff notes:

A close-up of the priest’s crotch, with white flowers in the foreground, symbolically suggests his sex. Another close-up of his feet separates the dancing feet from the priest’s body, thus symbolising the man’s inner struggle through the division of his body. (2012, 141)

One of the most suggestive scenes in which cinematography and lighting is critical is the lengthy interview Lennon conducts directly with Cleary in the documentary. The filming of this scene is particularly revealing and suggestive. The choice to shoot this interview with Cleary’s face partially in shadow recalls a well-established trope in film and television drama to emphasise a character’s duality and darker side.

Cinematography is often considered primarily in terms of how it serves the narrative. However, the choices filmmakers and cinematographers make have resonances which reach beyond the narrative. This is particularly the case with regard to how characters are lit within productions (exemplified for example within film noir productions), including where natural lighting is used. Cinematographer Raoul Coutard was very familiar with film noir and with the resonances of particular lighting for characterisation, evident in particular in his work as DOP on Jean Luc Godard’s classic tribute to film noir, Á Bout de Souffle (Godard 1960). This production is focused primarily on the exploits of criminal Michel (played by Jean-Paul Belmondo) who models himself on the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, one of the most recognisable noir actors in classical Hollywood, and noir lighting is used repeatedly in the film to accentuate Michel’s dichotomous character.

Writing regarding the use of the side-lit close-up in particular—revealing a face “half in shadow, half in light”, and used to film the interview with Cleary in Rocky Road to Dublin—Blain Brown describes film noir as

the birth of the protagonist who is not so clearly defined as purely good or evil. As with Walter Neff in Double Indemnity or Johnny Clay (…) in The Killing and so many others, they are characters full of contradiction and alienation. In their very being they may be pulled between good and evil, light and dark, illumination and shadow. (2012, 7)

While neither Lennon nor Coutard could have known the full extent of the “dark side” to Cleary at this time, they were clearly alert to a dichotomy evident in his behaviour and relationship with others. Lennon remarked on this duplicity some years later when he compared Cleary with the Soviet Union’s notorious security agency:

Father Cleary gave a perfect illustration of how Ireland’s KGB—the clergy—operated. They were your father, your brother, your non-drinking pal; they would sing the Chattanooga Shoe Shine Boy for you if you were dying in hospital. They were there to remind you, in the friendliest way, of your inherent tendency to evil and to extol the virtues of celibacy. (Lennon 2004)

Lennon’s remarks provide a compelling critique of both the prevailing “common sense” in Ireland of the period concerned—including the belief in an “inherent tendency to evil”—and the structures that maintained the “architecture of containment”, or in Lennon’s words “Ireland’s KGB”. This critique is evident in the cinematography of Rocky Road to Dublin which provides a further level of narration within the production, revealing the duplicity at work within Cleary but perhaps more broadly the Catholic Church in the period concerned. The extent of Cleary’s duplicity has become all the more apparent in more recent research; in addition to encouraging his housekeeper Phyllis Hamilton to put up her first child (which he fathered) for adoption, Cleary played a central role in referring single mothers to the now infamous St Patrick’s Guild adoption society (Phelan 2019). As indicated in the submissions to the Commission of Investigation into Mothers and Baby Homes, St. Patrick’s Guild’s own records reveal that it was involved in the secret export of 572 children to the US for adoption from the 1940s to the 1970s, which was more than any other adoption agency (O’Rourke et al. 2018).

Beyond identifying and bringing to the fore the functioning of power and duplicity within Irish society, Rocky Road to Dublin also gives voice to those previously silenced within this patriarchal and “priest ridden” (Banville 2005) society, evident in the final moving and frank interview in the film that features testimony from a young married woman. Unable to procure contraception, she describes her ongoing suffering, including repeated pregnancies and miscarriages, despite serious risks to her health, and the failure of church and state to intervene effectively to support her. In her comments, we are provided with a powerful insight into both the “common sense” expectations concerning women’s sexuality in Ireland in the period concerned and the “architecture of containment” that maintained and perpetuated a deeply inequitable society:

Most housewives couldn’t afford to go to a psychiatrist or analyst or anything and even if they could I think they’d go to a priest first and he’d tell you go down and offer it up like a good child and do the Nine FridaysFootnote 1 or a Novena or something or other and I’ll say a prayer for you and that’s it … anyway, they are always on the men’s side and so are the doctors in this country. They think women should sort of grin and bear it, and put up with it because, you know, we’re Catholics and we shouldn’t be making it harder for the men. (1:00:37–1:03:01)

Significantly this testimony is preceded immediately by the rather awkward departure of Michael Cleary from a graveyard, perhaps suggesting that for women to have a voice, the clergy needed to depart the stage.

Conclusion

In post-independent Ireland, the cinema was feared and suspected by both church and state, evident in one of the first pieces of legislation passed by the newly independent Dáil Éireann, the highly restrictive Censorship of Films Act (1923). This Act was informed primarily by concerns regarding Catholic morality in Ireland and the threat the cinema might pose to it. Nonetheless, the cinema had an important role in naturalising “common sense” (in Gramscian terms) regarding the elevated position of the church and acceptance of church teachings, particularly in matters of sexuality. Film also contributed to the endurance of an “architecture of containment”, imposed through a “self-interested silence” of church and state regarding those elements that did not fit neatly and securely into a narrow Catholic vision of Ireland and its people. Through positive depictions of religious figures, particularly the iconic stereotype of the Irish Catholic priest in mainstream cinema, cinema affirmed and normalised the authority of the Catholic Church in Ireland. This became all the more apparent when an indigenous film culture began to coalesce post-World War II around the efforts of the National Film Institute of Ireland and Gael Linn. In productions of both institutions, the position and authority of the church was rarely challenged or contradicted.

Peter Lennon’s Rocky Road to Dublin marked a key moment in breaking this silence imposed by Church and State, by engaging critically with the role of the Catholic Church in Ireland. The film identified the forces of control that maintained the silence and sustained injustice and invited those forces themselves—in particular members of the clergy—to comment, revealing (including through the distinctive cinematography employed in the film) their duplicity and hypocrisy. Furthermore, by allowing a woman to articulate her own challenging experiences in Ireland in the period concerned, due to controls (informed by Catholic teaching) placed on women’s sexuality, the film provided a rare opportunity for the female perspective to be frankly expressed on film at this time. In all this, Rocky Road to Dublin promoted the emergence of a critically engaged film practice in Ireland, the legacy of which is still evident in the continuing interrogation of historical oppression and abuse in contemporary Irish film and literature.