Strumpet City (1980)

Surely the best drama series that the Irish national broadcaster RTÉ has ever produced, this adaptation of James Plunkett’s novel is a wonderful reconstruction of Dublin’s social history at the time of the 1913 Lockout. While the style might seem a bit theatrical for modern viewers, the quality of the cast more than makes up for that. Donal McCann is probably the best of the lot as the union organizer Mulhall, but the performances are consistently excellent.

The class struggles of the time unfolded in a city where industrial development was much less advanced than in Belfast or Glasgow, Petrograd or Turin. Instead of a proletariat concentrated in giant factories that produced ships and steel, Dublin had a largely casual workforce employed on the docks and the tramways, and they could only defend their interests through militant syndicalist tactics. Jim Larkin forged a powerful union on that basis, which the employers saw as a mortal threat.

The characters in Strumpet City represent the whole spectrum of Dublin society in the early twentieth century, from landlords to tramps, priests to sex workers, with their lives connected in a way that seems entirely natural. Larkin himself plays a secondary role in the narrative, with Peter O’Toole taking on the challenge of bringing him to life. As one of the cast members later recalled, O’Toole’s extraordinary charisma made it very easy for the others on set to imagine that they were actually in Larkin’s presence.

From start to finish, the show doesn’t pull any political punches, showing how the Catholic Church took the side of the employers all down the line until the union was defeated. The state that repressed the working class of Dublin would soon be driven off the island at gunpoint, but a new power elite was ready to take its place, determined to maintain the social hierarchy that had developed under British rule.

Taffin (1988)

After its release in 1988, Taffin effectively disappeared without a trace, while its star Pierce Brosnan ascended to global fame in the role of James Bond. The film has acquired a certain retrospective notoriety in the past few years thanks to a particular scene where Brosnan delivers his line in a way that has to be seen (and more importantly heard) to be believed. But there’s much more to Taffin than this admittedly bizarre outburst. While it would be too much to describe this as a great or even a good movie, it’s certainly an interesting one.

The main implausibility arises from the casting of Brosnan and Alison Doody, who had already featured in a Bond film of her own (A View to a Kill) by the time Taffin came out. Brosnan and Doody are both so luminously beautiful that it’s absurd to imagine them hanging out in a small Irish town during the 1980s when they should be turning heads in Paris or New York. Brosnan’s character profile also strains credulity as a tough-guy debt collector with a penchant for existentialism who dropped out while training to be a priest.

As if to compensate for this head-scratching setup, the rest of the film is a gritty exercise in social realism, as Brosnan starts unravelling a case of small-scale planning corruption involving offshore bank accounts (one of Ireland’s main growth industries at the time). This in turn leads him into a head-on clash with hired goons working for a company that wants to build a chemical plant as they seek to intimidate a local environmental campaign.

The supporting case is full of great Irish actors like Ray McAnally, Gerard McSorley, and Frank Kelly; there’s even a brief cameo from Dermot Morgan, the future star of Father Ted. Taffin may stand in the same relation to a well-made John Grisham thriller that Wicklow stands in relation to California, but its political heart is definitely in the right place.

The Field (1990)

In 1870, Karl Marx observed that the land question had thus far been “the exclusive form of the social question because it is a question of existence, of life and death, for the immense majority of the Irish people, and because it is at the same time inseparable from the national question.” Jim Sheridan’s adaptation of The Field, a play by John B. Keane, takes that insight and turns it into dark, obsessive poetry.

US critics like Roger Ebert and Rita Kempley panned the film when it came out, dismissing it as a whimsical exercise in blarney and begorra, which merely showed how little they knew about Ireland. Martin McDonagh’s film The Banshees of Inisherin really was a self-consciously stylized depiction of rural Ireland in the early twentieth century that shouldn’t be mistaken for the real thing; The Field, on the other hand, has a solid foothold in the soil of Connemara.

Richard Harris plays the lead character, Thady McCabe, universally known as Bull to the villagers for reasons that soon become apparent when he encounters the slightest obstacle in his path. The Bull has spent years working on a field that he rents from a local widow and expects to buy it without challenge now that she has decided to sell. Unfortunately for him, a prosperous American with roots in the area wants to get his hands on the field too, and he has the local priest on his side.

Harris turns up the heat as he delivers spellbinding monologues distinguishing between the law of the state and what he calls the law of the land. McCabe finds the idea that market exchange can determine the ownership of a field over which he has sweated so absurd that it’s barely worth considering. Although the film is set during the early years of Irish independence, the hostile view of colonial legality still endures, and the villagers have their own moral economy and a code of ethics that holds informers in contempt.

The priest despises this culture and tells his American friend that Christianity as codified by the Catholic Church is no more than a thin veneer over the traditional beliefs of the people. The Bull taunts his clerical adversary by asking him where the Church was during the Great Famine of the 1840s, still within living memory. At another point in the film, he delivers his own take on the biblical phrase about rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s: “Leave us to our ways, and we’ll leave God to his.”

“Bar Association” from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1996)

Colm Meaney doesn’t seem to have changed his political outlook very much since he was a teenager in the 1960s who keenly admired the German New Left radical Rudi Dutschke. Over the course of an eclectic career, he ended up playing the Star Trek character with the second-most appearances in the entire franchise, putting Leonard Nimoy and Patrick Stewart in the shade. Miles O’Brien is every bit as Irish as his name would suggest, and this episode of Deep Space Nine was surely his finest political hour.

In the opening scenes, we see O’Brien and his pal Doctor Bashir popping down to the holodeck for one of the historical reenactments they enjoy so much. This time, they’re dressed as medieval Gaelic lords so they can cosplay the battle of Clontarf — O’Brien insists on being high king, since he claims to be a descendant of Brian Boru. However, it’s a more recent period of history that inspires him to take the side of the Ferengi, a group of aliens who work at the space-station bar, when they try to organize a union.

It’s actually Bashir who first suggests the idea of a union to Rom, one of the Ferengi, although he tells him that a strike would only be a weapon of last resort. O’Brien, much more Fenian than Fabian in his outlook, insists that strike action will be absolutely necessary and inspires Rom with the story of his ancestor Seán O’Brien, who led the anthracite miners of Pennsylvania with indomitable determination back in 1902. He only mentions as an afterthought the fact that Seán’s bullet-riddled corpse was fished out of the Allegheny River two days before the strike ended.

When the Ferengi down tools, O’Brien is furious to see his Klingon friend Worf cross the picket line, and they come to blows, much to the indignation of the ship’s captain, who leaves them both to spend the night in the cells. Before the episode is over, Rom has faced down anti-union goons and quoted directly from the Communist Manifesto, although he ends the strike with an artful compromise that delivers a wage hike while allowing the boss (his brother, as it happens) to save face.

Dancing at Lughnasa (1998)

If you want to see how bleak life could be for Irish women during the last century, Peter Mullan’s film The Magdalene Sisters recreates the world of Ireland’s brutally misogynist carceral state; Small Things Like These is a more recent take on the same subject. Dancing at Lughnasa isn’t quite as dark, although it still doesn’t sugarcoat the pill. This film version of Brian Friel’s play tells the story of five sisters living in a Donegal village during the 1930s, on the brink of losing the fragile autonomy they’ve carved out from Ireland’s power structures of gender and class.

The oldest sister Kate, played by Meryl Streep, is the only one with a regular job — she works as a teacher, which was the best career available for women at the time (although they were obliged to resign from their posts if they got married). Two of her younger sisters do piecework at home, knitting gloves to augment the family budget, before the opening of a new factory spells doom for this economic lifeline. The only male presence in the household is Michael, the seven-year-old son of Christina, the youngest sister. Christina isn’t married, and Michael’s Welsh father, Gerry (played with just the right amount of fecklessness by Rhys Ifans), is deeply unreliable, dropping in and out of their lives at short notice.

It was standard practice at the time for unmarried women to have their children taken off them by the authorities to be raised in ghastly orphanages, but Michael has been protected from that fate by his mother and her sisters. That helps explain the unconcealed hostility to Kate displayed by the priest who is in charge of her school. He is also troubled by the return of her older brother Jack, a priest who spent decades working as a Catholic missionary in Africa.

Jack has “gone native,” in the parlance of British colonialism, and clearly prefers the pre-Christian religious beliefs of the people he lived with in Uganda to the doctrines propagated by the Vatican. You can see how far he’s drifted from the orbit of Rome when he talks with Gerry about the Welshman’s plan to join the International Brigades: “The Catholic Church, are they for Franco? They would be.” Jack couldn’t care less about Gerry siding with the forces of godless communism in the battle for Spain, although he clearly wishes he was less of a jerk to Christina and Michael.

The film uses Jack’s character to show that beneath the formal hegemony of the Church, much of Irish society still adhered to a worldview that Catholic theologians would consider pagan.  “Lughnasa” is an ancient festival to mark the beginning of the harvest that was still widely celebrated in the twentieth century. Self-appointed moral guardians had to work very hard to impose a puritanical code on this social landscape, and they never quite succeeded. The size and savagery of Ireland’s carceral state, with its imposing apparatus of Magdalene laundries and industrial schools, was itself a backhanded admission that the repression of love and sex in Irish society during the last century was profoundly unnatural.

Gangs of New York (2002)

If truth be told, Gangs of New York isn’t one of Martin Scorsese’s best films, and the Irish accents delivered by actors who aren’t actually Irish range from questionable to atrocious. But the movie deserves a lot of credit for tackling a story that will have taken many of Scorsese’s habitual viewers right out of their comfort zone. While the script takes its fair share of liberties with nineteenth-century history, as you would expect from a big-budget Hollywood movie, the picture it paints isn’t too far removed from the central thesis of Noel Ignatiev’s book How the Irish Became White.

Naturally, Daniel Day-Lewis towers over the rest of the cast as the nativist demagogue Bill Cutting. When Cutting rails against a plague of invading migrants, said to be in thrall to an alien belief system that is fundamentally incompatible with democracy, we could be listening to Douglas Murray or Geert Wilders as they rant about Muslims today. However, the people he has in mind are Irish Catholics.

It would be nice to imagine that anyone who had been on the receiving end of such hostility would never embrace any form of racism themselves. Yet the climax of the film unflinchingly depicts some of the Irish anti-draft rioters lynching African Americans on the streets of New York. It’s an important if depressing reminder that one form of legitimate class resentment — in this case, against rich folk buying their way out of military service during the Civil War — can be diverted into a purely reactionary channel.

Just compare Gangs of New York with another film about Irish American gangsters, Black Mass. The Whitey Bulger biopic entirely glossed over the racial politics of South Boston during the 1970s and ’80s, even though it was an essential part of the story. A scene where Bulger’s politician brother tells his antibusing audience that “anyone who isn’t called a racist in this campaign isn’t doing his job” would have been very cinematic, and historically accurate. But the film makers no doubt thought it would have been box-office poison, at least for the people who like to regurgitate memes about “Irish slaves” but have no interest whatsoever in Irish history.

Breakfast on Pluto (2005)

This was the second collaboration between Neil Jordan and Pat McCabe after the 1998 adaptation of McCabe’s novel The Butcher Boy, a pitch-black story of child abuse, class resentment, and murder in a small Monaghan town at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis (a historic backdrop that inspires my single favorite line in Irish cinema: “It’ll be a bitter day for this town if the world comes to an end.”). The Butcher Boy is a great film, but Breakfast on Pluto is even better. It’s also a rare case of a movie that surpasses the novel it was based on.

Cillian Murphy stars as Patrick “Kitten” Braden, the unacknowledged progeny of a Catholic priest and his housekeeper in (you guessed it) a small Monaghan town, about a decade after the events of The Butcher Boy. Anyone who knows Murphy primarily for his role as Thomas Shelby in Peaky Blinders may find his performance here to be an enjoyable trip. Kitten is trans, although nobody uses that term and there’s no explicit discussion of gender identity in the film, just a mixture of confusion, prejudice, and unbothered decency from the various people she encounters in the shadow of Ireland’s latest war.

It’s more than enough to enrage the rancid bottom-feeders of Ireland’s far-right subculture who have taken to picketing libraries with banners that read “THERE ARE ONLY TWO GENDERS” (I wish I was making this up), not to mention the people who draft Donald Trump’s executive orders. Music nerds may enjoy spotting Gavin Friday of the Virgin Prunes as a glam rocker who supports the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music as a refined serial killer (although “enjoy” may not be the right word to use in relation to Ferry’s performance). The redemption arc for a British cop who first appears on screen trying to beat a false confession out of Kitten for an IRA bombing may be uncomfortably facile, but that’s a minor shortcoming overall.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006)

When The Wind That Shakes the Barley first appeared, an article by Ruth Dudley Edwards in the Daily Mail posed the following indignant question in CAPITAL LETTERS for emphasis: “WHY DOES KEN LOACH LOATHE HIS COUNTRY SO MUCH?” The bafflement that Dudley Edwards expressed about Loach’s view of British imperialism tends to suggest that she was never cut out for the historical profession, although she proved to be admirably suited for the role of native informant, always a lucrative gig in the British Tory press.

There was no end of complaints that Loach had made the British characters in the film so unsympathetic. In fact, his narrative includes a soldier who lets the IRA prisoners escape when they are facing summary execution. What his critics really wanted was a sepia-tinged portrait of the frustrated executioners, so this example of British decency left them unmoved. In any case, the tedious carping of imperial nostalgists shouldn’t distract our attention from what really matters.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley supplies an important corrective to the Great Man theory of the Irish national revolution that Neil Jordan brought to the screen in his Michael Collins biopic. While focusing on an ordinary IRA unit in Cork during the War of Independence, Loach also gives us a sense of mass popular resistance to British rule. We see railway workers refusing to carry soldiers on their trains and the operation of republican courts that bypassed the existing legal system.

The film’s view of the Irish Civil War as a class conflict is not the only way of reading these events, but it’s an important part of the story. While the characters played by Cillian Murphy and Liam Cunningham have more of a worked-out socialist perspective than the majority of IRA volunteers at the time, the case they make against the Anglo-Irish Treaty clearly echoes the arguments of anti-Treaty republicans like Liam Mellows and Peadar O’Donnell. By the time the film is over, a counterrevolutionary backlash against the growth of land and labor agitation in the years after 1916 is well underway, forging the ultraconservative mold for the Irish Free State.

Peaky Blinders (2013–22)

Although it’s set in Birmingham, Peaky Blinders has fair title to be included on an Irish viewing list, quite apart from the central role that Cillian Murphy plays in the saga as Tommy Shelby, the Romani war veteran who becomes one of Britain’s leading gangsters during the 1920s. Irish political themes repeatedly spill over onto the streets of Birmingham, thanks not least to Chester Campbell, the sinister cop who is brought over from Belfast to impose order on the Midlands.

Sam Neill, who plays Campbell, does an excellent job with a tricky role, explaining to his subordinates with uncompromising zeal that he sees communism and Irish republicanism as two heads of the same foul beast. Several characters, including Winston Churchill himself, feel obliged to remind Campbell that he’s not in Ireland anymore and can’t just have people killed without disposing of the bodies properly.

Along with his no-nonsense methodology, Campbell imports a young woman from an affluent Dublin family to infiltrate Shelby’s operation; she was motivated to enlist as a spy when the IRA killed her father, Campbell’s fellow officer from the Royal Irish Constabulary. Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, who has played a few real-life IRA members in his time, also has a brief cameo, this time as a fictitious Fenian.

As the series goes on, the political metanarrative becomes more than a little strained, with Tommy enlisting simultaneously as a Labour MP and a government agent. He flirts with communist militants and White Russian exiles before getting into bed, at least metaphorically, with Sir Oswald Mosley, albeit in the hope of undermining the fascist cause.

In the course of his dangerous liaison with Mosley, Tommy has to break bread with the forces of Scottish loyalism, represented by the Billy Boys, a sectarian Protestant gang. Fans of Glasgow Rangers on both sides of the Irish Sea still like to bash out a song that celebrates the Billy Boys, including the poetic line “we’re up to our necks in Fenian blood.”

The Foreigner (2017)

Films about the IRA make up quite a hefty genre at this stage, and there have been some brilliant movies produced along the way, but the real connoisseur will gravitate toward the absolute stinkers. Who could forget Tommy Lee Jones in Blown Away making a bomb in his Boston safe house while the music of U2 plays in the background? Jones isn’t the only great actor who has found himself embroiled in a green-tinged fiasco, although when it comes to casting, you can’t beat the sheer oddity of Johnny Was.

Erstwhile footballer Vinnie Jones stars as an IRA man alongside erstwhile pop singer Samantha Mumba and erstwhile boxer Lennox Lewis, not to mention Roger Daltrey of The Who and Eriq La Salle, ER’s Dr Benton, who is reinvented as a menacing Yardie gangster. Patrick Bergin lurks among them all, clearly wondering what happened to his career since the days when he starred in big-budget movies alongside the likes of Julia Roberts and Harrison Ford. To compound the strangeness, the film is meant to be set in Brixton but was clearly produced in Belfast.

Advance hype suggested that The Foreigner would surpass any of these efforts to become the worst IRA movie of all time. There is no way of writing the sentence “Jackie Chan takes on a group of dissident republicans” that is likely to induce optimism about the final result. Yet if we look away from Chan’s glowering presence — easier said than done, admittedly — The Foreigner is quite a slick piece of work. Pierce Brosnan’s turn as the fictitious Sinn Féin leader Liam Hennessy, who is definitely not based on any real-life characters, turns out by sheer coincidence to be a brilliant imitation of Gerry Adams, right down to the beard.

The strange thing about The Foreigner is that it appears to have been written by someone with an above-average knowledge of Irish republicanism who nonetheless relies on British neoconservatives and the columnists of Dublin’s Sunday Independent newspaper for their political analysis. As well as Not Gerry Adams, you have characters that are clearly based on republicans who preferred to stay out of the limelight such as Bobby Storey and Thomas “Slab” Murphy, the former IRA commander in South Armagh.

The background political message of the film is that the entire peace process was a sham, with the IRA retaining all its weapons and just waiting for the opportunity to go back to war. I’m fairly sure that nobody ever wondered what a martial arts movie about the IRA written by Michael Gove or Eoghan Harris would look like, but the answer to that question is The Foreigner.

Kneecap (2024)

As soon as Kneecap started to attract attention in the Irish and British media, unionist politicians accused the Irish-language hip-hop trio of glorifying terrorism and other transgressions of that nature. The name of the group should have indicated that there was something more playful and ironic going on here.

If a band called itself “Semtex,” “ArmaLite,” or “H-Block,” it would be reasonable to expect an uncomplicated celebration of the IRA campaign. “Kneecap,” on the other hand, refers to the standard punishment that republican paramilitaries meted out to young working-class men for joyriding, selling drugs, or generally making a nuisance of themselves — at least in the eyes of self-appointed vigilantes.

This (somewhat fictionalized) film version of the band’s rise since 2017 should clear up any misunderstanding, except for those who are determined to be outraged. Kneecap is not about the Troubles — it’s about the post-cease-fire generation, the ones who have grown up in the protracted aftermath of a war that their parents experienced and in some cases fought. Instead of taking part in riots or serving time in Long Kesh, they have ketamine-fueled hallucinations of Gerry Adams (played by the actual Gerry Adams, who had the nous to embrace Kneecap wholeheartedly, although his movement would have taken a very different view of West Belfast hood culture and recreational drug use in the not-so-distant past).

The members of the group and their director, Rich Peppiatt, evidently devoted a lot of energy to producing something that would work as a film, with sharp dialogue and genuine character development as events unfold. They also clearly put in the hours learning how to act — playing yourself on camera is no easy job, but they carry it off very well.

Michael Fassbender is hilarious as the republican father of Kneecap’s Móglaí Bap who faked his own death to evade the British authorities but makes regular appearances to see how his son is getting along. As you might have guessed, this bit is pure invention — his real-life dad was a prominent Irish-language campaigner who died at the end of last year — but it captures something real about the experience of families who were expected to share their fathers (or mothers) with a higher cause during the Troubles.

While Fassbender’s character is subjected to gentle and affectionate mockery, the latter-day republican paramilitaries trying to keep the war going appear in a very unsympathetic light as thuggish hypocrites who rail against the drug trade while discreetly profiting from it. Nobody could watch this film and come away thinking it was a good idea to join or support the confusing medley of republican splinter groups with their aimless “keep her lit” philosophy, all of which seem to be honeycombed with informers. If the Democratic Unionist Party had any sense, it would welcome the idea of republicans who want to advance their cause with a ballot box in one hand and an Irish-language act in the other, but there’s no danger of that happening any time soon.