why do the Irish hate Martin McDonaghs film?
Towards the end of the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation Captain Picard and his crew visit a deep-space colony basted in Blarney. Its inhabitants, “the Bringloidi”, are agrarian, quick to anger and dim-twitted. Their accents are Irish; they say things such as “take the pig out there, will you?”. Even in 1989, the stereotyping was controversial.
Watching Martin McDonagh’s Oscar-nominated and now Bafta-lauded The Banshees of Inisherin, I couldn’t help but think of The Next Generation’s interstellar leprechauns. Banshees, about the violent falling out of two best friends on a remote Irish island, takes place in a Shamrock-hued alternative universe every bit as out-to-space as an obscure Star Trek episode.
Darby O’Gill-esque rainbows breach the cloud line. People spend all day in a pub swaddled in a stygian gloom. Characters communicate in the hyperactive stage Irish cant – London-raised McDonagh’s forte since his breakout 1996 play The Beauty Queen of Leenane, a grand Guignol piece about the decline in the relationship between a spinster daughter and her mother. Everyone says “me” instead of “my”. Letter “g”s are dropped as though infused with the potato blight. Are you gettin’ me drift?
Hollywood has gone bonkers for Banshees: just look at those nine Oscar nominations. It also picked up four awards at the recent Baftas. In Ireland, though, the rhapsodic reception has left many baffled. “The film ends up feeding the usual stereotypes about Ireland…International film awards are by no means a good film guide,” complained Jenny Farrell, a lecturer at Galway Mayo Institute of Technology in Galway.
“Is it just more Martin McDonagh shtick?,” wondered the Irish Times. In an essay on the American website Slate, Mark O’Connell wrote: “It isn’t always clear whether McDonagh is subverting ancient clichés about Ireland and the Irish—misty poeticism, rural backwardness, prodigious boozing, etc – or merely employing them in his own distinct way”. That last piece, in particular, whipped many Americans into a frenzy of apoplexy. How dare the Irish object to a dark comedy that depicted them as violent leprechauns?
Banshees lost out at the Baftas to Best Film winner All Quiet on The Western Front. It did, however, scoop the gong for Best Original Screenplay for McDonagh. It also won Best British Film. This was at one level appropriate given the prominence of outdated anglosphere tropes about Ireland. At the same time, describing Banshees as “British” did feel absurd. As McDonagh acknowledged on the podium, saying, The best what award?” He added that one cast member at least was from the UK. “Thanks to Rosie, our stand-in donkey, who is British. Yes, yes, she’s from Stoke-on-Trent.”
Under the Shamrocks and the shillelaghs, The Banshees of Inisherin is a study of male friendship. Early on, Brendan Gleeson’s character Colm ends his friendship with Colin Farrell’s Pádraic. Colm considers his (former) pal boring and silly – and does not want to waste his remaining years exchanging vacuous banter over pints. Instead, he wishes to focus on composing music for which he will hopefully be remembered.
Pádraic, whose other best friend is that remove miniature donkey, doesn’t take the rejection well and things spiral. To reveal more would be to spoil the film for those yet to watch it (it is streaming on Disney+). Suffice to say, gonzo violence, livestock abuse and heartache ensue.
Gonzo violence, livestock abuse and heartache are promising ingredients at a time when most of the multiplex is marinated in identikit CGI. McDonagh is to be praised, too, for taking seriously the concept of male friendship – so often mocked in popular culture nowadays. Underneath its Quiet Man curlicues, a much better movie strains for freedom.
It’s just a shame McDonagh should choose to shroud his character study in hackneyed Paddy-isms. The fictional Inisherin – it’s supposed to be one of the Aran Islands – is a village where everyone is an idiot. Pádraic sleeps in the same bedroom as his sister Siobhán (Kerry Condon), just like Ted and Dougal in Father Ted. Gleeson, meanwhile, appears to be auditioning for the part of the dopey Irish builder in Fawlty Towers. He is a picture of twinkling vindictiveness.
McDonagh gets the little stuff wrong too. Nobody speaks Irish, to this day the daily language of the Aran Islands. The Civil War unfolding on the mainland is a conflict of which the islanders claim to have no understanding. In reality, the Aran Islands had been a crucible for the violence wracking Ireland in the early 1920s. The British had tried to “invade” the islands in December 1920, having abandoned them earlier that year. Later, during the Civil War, 11 IRA insurgents were executed by the newly established Irish army in nearby Galway. (My own grandfather fought in the Civil War.)
Yet for all those inaccuracies, Ireland will nonetheless welcome a potential upsurge in tourism to Achill Island, in Mayo, where the bulk of the filming took place. The local council has launched a brochure “highlighting the beauty spots featured in Martin McDonagh's film”. “Interest in the island has risen since [Banshees]…and an influx of visitors is expected to discover the beauty of Achill for themselves,” writes the Connaught Telegraph.
The Banshees of Inisherin has also contributed to a boom in Irish cinema. Four of the cast are vying for Oscars – including Colin Farrell, who has received his first Best Actor nod. It won’t be the only Irish presence at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood on March 12. Normal People’s Paul Mescal goes head-to-head with Farrell following his nomination for Aftersun. And the Irish language film An Cailín Ciúin (The Quiet Girl) is up for Best International Feature.
These are set to be followed into the spotlight by Flora and Son, a new musical from Once director John Carney. Starring Eve Hewson (daughter of rock star Bono), it was a big hit at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Such recognition has contributed to the sense that Irish film and TV are on an upward trajectory. As has the popularity last year of Sharon Horgan’s Bad Sisters on Apple TV + – a tale of skulduggery and murder amidst the designer kitchens of upper-middle-class suburban Dublin.
That success has the feel of good news flourishing overnight. McDonagh, by contrast, has operated in the same furrow for decades. The caricatures deployed in Banshees have been a feature of his work going back to The Beauty Queen of Leenane. Beauty Queen was famously rejected by the Abbey, Ireland’s national theatre – fomenting a grudge that McDonagh seemingly holds dear to this day.
Irish people have, for their part, recognised his work as heavy-handed burlesque from the start. They have also been unconvinced that McDonagh is satirising stereotypes rather than championing them. A 2001 Irish Times review of The Lieutenant of Inishmore, about a terrorist heartbroken by the death of his cat, lamented that “every caricature is dim-witted [...] and violence seems endemic in all souls”. Yet in the places that matter: London, New York and LA, McDonagh’s weaponised Blarney has gone down a treat.
Much better, certainly, than the attempted transfer of his shtick to the US with 2017’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. It was Oscar-nominated and acclaimed. But many in the US also called out its simplest portrayal of racial tensions in the United States. “McDonagh's attempts to script the black experience in America are often fumbling... full of outdated tropes,” wrote the Daily Beast. Of course, fumbling backwards and outdated has been McDonagh’s stock in trade. The difference was that you can get away with caricaturing Ireland – Americans love it. Try that with America itself and voices with weight will call you out.
The shame of all this is that Banshees of Inisherin has overshadowed the aforementioned An Cailín Ciúin (The Quiet Girl in English). With dialogue largely in the Irish language and adapted from a novel by County Wicklow author Claire Keegan, the film deserves its place on the Oscar shortlist for Best International Feature. Set in 1980s Wexford, it is far more Irish than Banshees, exploring such subjects as Ireland’s historical mistreatment of children. Its evocation of the quiet despair of Eighties Ireland is gut-punchingly accurate. Thoughtful, truthful, Irish – it is everything The Banshees Of Inisherin isn’t.
McDonagh has built a career out of repackaging 19th-century Irish caricatures. Who can blame him – he grew up in the UK. While he identifies as “London-Irish” (his parents are from the West of Ireland), his perspective on Ireland is a British one. But what of the Irish actors who have done well out of his patronage? Colin Farrell had an artistic rebirth with McDonagh’s In Bruges in 2008. And The Banshees of Inisherin has transformed the lives of Kerry Condon and Barry Keoghan, who walked away from the Baftas with shiny new awards and have both been nominated for the Oscars.
This is a story as old as Hollywood. The dodgy Irish builder in Fawlty Towers was played by esteemed Dublin stage figure David Kelly, whose first major role was in an Abbey Theatre production of Beckett’s Krapp's Last Tape. Colm Meaney, the Dublin actor who portrayed Star Trek’s Chief Miles O’Brien, appeared in that notorious Bringloidi episode. By all accounts, he winced through it – but felt he was not well enough established to take a stand.
Several years later, though, Meaney had become a big cheese in outer space and was a leading cast member of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, as Chief O’Brien. Which is how he ended up being asked to share the screen with a leprechaun.
Meaney put his foot down, saying: “Every Irish actor I know has worked his entire life to overcome the stereotype of Irish people and leprechauns. It's really racist, and I don't want to do it”. He knew Blarney when he saw it and he took a stand. Star Trek’s producers backed down and replaced the leprechaun with the fairytale villain Rumpelstiltskin. What a shame that Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, when presented with the Oirish orgy that is Banshees of Inisherin, didn’t follow Meaney’s example and shout “stop”.
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