| A Savage Indictment of Post Independence
By Ronan McGreevy
Peter Lennon’s 1968 documentary film Rocky Road To Dublin ran for
seven weeks in one cinema in Ireland and was never seen again. It has just
been re-released in Ireland this week. Ronan McGreevy takes a look.
What do you do with your revolution once you’ve got it?’
It’s a question asked in a fascinating film which has just been re-released
to unanimous critical acclaim on both sides of the Irish Sea.
The question was posed by The Guardian journalist Peter Lennon in his
documentary The Rocky Road to Dublin which he released in 1968.
The timing of the release would give the film a prophetic quality. Despite
being rejected by Irish society, it was selected as the Irish entry for
that year’s Cannes film festival.
The festival was interrupted as student riots spread across France in
May of that year, but the film was shown in the Sorbonne to protesting students.
They sought the overthrow of the Gaullist post-war society and its replacement
with something approaching revolutionary socialism.
They championed the Rocky Road, but only as a model of what not to do
when the revolution was won.
Lennon’s thesis was that the men of the 1916 Rising were idealists who
wanted to create a better society than the one that had gone before.
The Proclamation was full of sonorous and well-meaning language about
guaranteeing “religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities
to all its citizens” and “cherishing the children of the nation equally”.
Instead, Lennon maintained the confessional state that emerged after
independence was the opposite of what a republic should be.
It’s a powerful argument, but not without its flaws. The socialist James
Connolly would surely have been horrified at how the Catholic Church dominated
Irish society.
A republic, by definition, is a secular society beholden to no special
interest, but Padraig Pearse was deeply religious and Eamon De Valera, who
did more than anyone else to create the Ireland that Lennon hated, was another
of the leaders of the 1916 Rising.
Nevertheless, Lennon believed that Ireland had become a society in thrall
to a generation of revolutionary leaders who were holding the country back.
“This is an attempt to reconstruct in images the plight of an island
community which survived nearly 700 years of English occupation,” he says
in the memorable opening lines of the film “and then nearly sank under the
weight of its own heroes and clergy”.
It was a country “with its future in the hands of people who think in
terms of the past”.
The Rocky Road to Dublin is an angry film. Its tone is set by the great
short story writer Sean O’Faolain who said a foreign occupier had been replaced
by, what he memorably called, an “urbanised peasants”.
The result, was a society, “without moral courage, never speaking in
moments of crisis and in constant alliance with an obscurantist, repressive,
regressive and uncultured church”.
Harsh words, indeed, but harsher still are the utterances of the subjects
of the film which amounts to a society condemned out of its own mouth.
A GAA official justifies the Ban, a film censor criticises England for
“its indulgent liberalism”, a schoolchild recites the catechism as if it
was a bus timetable.
“Because of Original Sin, we are born without sanctifying grace, our
intellect is darkened, our will is weakened, our passions incline us to
evil and we are subject to suffering and death,” a boy of about nine says
without a flicker of irony.
Worst of all, was the arrogant, presumptuous hypocrite Father Michael
Cleary who accepts celibacy as part of the priesthood even while he already
had a child with his housekeeper Phyllis Hamilton.
Lennon skilfully gave the man enough rope to hang himself. Cleary’s shocking
lack of self-awareness and his domineering nature was indicative of an institutional
church that had lost the run of itself.
Rocky Road to Dublin is a savage indictment of post-independence Ireland,
but yet it’s also a touching portrayal.
As Lennon says in the “Making of the Rocky Road to Dublin,” he was motivated
by affection for his fellow countrymen rather than anger and his film was
a form of patriotism. He knew things could be a lot better.
There are marvellous scenes in pubs and dance halls. The film closes
with dozens of schoolchildren running after the camera. This is hardly an
accident.
The brilliant French cameraman Raul Coutard wanted to show the children,
who could recite in a dreary monotone about dangers to chastity, were capable
of optimism, spontaneity and, with it, hope for the future.
On its original release, Rocky Road to Dublin was condemned in Ireland.
It ran for seven weeks in one cinema and was never seen again.
Clearly, a chronically insecure society could not deal with such harsh
self-criticism, but things have changed immeasurably.
Its re-release in Ireland this week generated only warm reviews and capacity
audiences, though it is unlikely to have the emotional resonance it had
for previous generations.
It is very difficult for anybody under 30 to remember what Ireland used
to be like. The society that Lennon chronicled doesn’t exist anymore. Those
who fought for a secular Ireland have won.
Some will say that is a bad thing, that the consumerist society that
has been created in Ireland is no better than what went before.
They should see this film and be disabused of that notion.
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