A Fair Exchange: An Ideal for an Employment Agency?
Ireland has changed a great deal over the past twenty years, but how has the state of film production changed? Ted Sheehy asks whether film employment has become more important than telling stories.

It’s been twenty years since the first edition of this publication slid into the photocopier tray. Twenty years also since Charlie Haughey kicked the Irish Film Board into touch for six years, maintaining in the Dáil that the Arts Council and an untested new tax break would pick up the slack, if not the pieces, from a Board which he maintained had failed its remit.

It has been twenty years during which a great number of not very great films has been made in Ireland, by ourselves and others. Twenty years over the course of which Ireland has changed immeasurably and not always, as the cliché goes, for the better. Just as Ireland as society became synonymous with Ireland as economy, the cultural ideal of Irish filmmaking was largely discarded in favour of, or subsumed by, Irish film production as enterprise.

The title for this article is suggested by a reading of Karen Vandevelde’s essay, ‘”As the Snake it Shed its Skin” – or, How the National Ideal of the Irish National Theatre Was Abandoned in Favour of a Corporate Trademark (1902–1906)’, in ‘Critical Ireland, New Essays in Literature and Culture’ (Four Courts Press, 2001).

It seems to me that there are some parallels to be found between the recent two decades of Irish filmmaking and the early history of the Irish Literary Theatre with its aspiration towards a ‘national theatre’ and its subsequent metamorphosis nearly a decade later into the Irish National Theatre Society Ltd.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 116.