BY: RONAN DOYLE
“Given Ireland’s rapid expansion over the last ten years, and given that the film industry is driven by capital, it is perhaps no surprise that national cinema has gaily skipped over the messier work of examining gay history, desire, marginality, disease, sexual practice, hatred, love, pornography and so on.”
That these lamenting lines, laid down by Fintan Walsh in the January 2008 edition of Film Ireland, might as easily apply in the present day is a troubling indictment of Irish society and cinema. For all the interim strides made by and for our queer citizenry, for all the rapid expansion that our screen industry has undergone in the wake of our economic hangover, it remains, a decade on from that initial decrying, no great surprise that LGBT lives and loves remain a relative rarity on Irish screens. But should it not surprise us? The effective absence of an Irish queer cinema seems increasingly at-odds with an off-screen embrace of Irish queer narratives, which have permeated our politics and policies, but seemingly not yet our plots.
Perhaps, at least lately, it’s a consequence of a deeper soul-searching: the crash-cusp vantage from which Walsh wrote, after all, afforded a more optimistic outlook of the possibilities for progress than hindsight provides; the gutting of arts funding and the profound reconsideration of Irish identity at large required after the bottom fell out from under us left little scope for explorations of otherness in any detail. Yet as our economic fortunes have once more turned, and the idea of Irishness we’ve arrived at saw to it that social liberalism swept us into what might naively have seemed a new pluralist paradigm, there has emerged a jarring disconnect between the new image of the Irish accepted (and offered) abroad and the picture we project upon our own screens, a curious chasm separating the rapidly-liberalised island some international outlets have rushed to describe us from the stubbornly straight society our cinema would still seem to depict us.
18 CinÉireann / May 2018