Introduction

Abstract

One of the earliest heroic male figures to appear in an Irish-made film was Mat ‘the Thrasher’ Donovan in Knocknagow (1918). Defined by his relationship to the land, Donovan exhibited strong sporting abilities, unfaltering self-discipline and a keen sense of community. Catholic and hard-working, he was untainted by modernity’s excesses and by the feminised, urban culture of Britain (see Figure 1.1). As such, he epitomised the New Gaelic Man of the early twentieth century. Fast-forward almost ninety years and we encounter a radically different range of male protagonists on the Irish screen: from Stuart Townsend’s slick, metrosexual Lothario in About Adam (see Figure 1.2) and Cillian Murphy’s troubled transvestite Patrick ‘Kitten’ Braden in Breakfast on Pluto (2005) to Colin Farrell’s laddish, underclass criminal Lehiff in Intermission. This book attempts to tell the story of how and why images of men in Irish cinema have changed so dramatically over the past century and, in doing so, maps out the changing historical relationship between nation, cinema, and masculinity in Ireland.