The new state-of-the-art Croke Park was the venue for the party following last night's Irish premiere of John Boorman's film The Tiger's Tail at the Savoy cinema in Dublin. Brendan Gleeson, who plays the lead male role in the film, attended the premiere last night with Kim Cattrall, the Sex and the City star who plays his wife in the film.
Boorman, who wrote and directed the film, was unable to attend due to illness.
The film's protagonist, Liam O'Leary, is an Irish property developer determined to build an ultra-modern sports stadium in Dublin, and he is quite prepared to bribe a Government minister and members of the city council to advance his plans.
The film is a black comedy that takes a caustic view of Celtic Tiger Ireland.
"We've got the Celtic Tiger by the tail," O'Leary declares as he accepts an industry enterprise award at a black-tie ceremony in a Dublin hotel. "If we let it go, it will turn around and bite us."
Boorman, who has lived in Co Wicklow since the early 1970s, is unsparing in his depiction of the malaises he perceives in modern Ireland.
The film opens in the evening rush hour, on one of several scenes where the city is gridlocked with traffic. A sequence shot in Temple Bar shows a young woman vomiting in the street, two young men violently kicking another on the ground, and a plush bar where the young patrons consume cocaine and ecstasy.
An old friend of the O'Leary character, a priest played by Ciaran Hinds, runs a shelter for the homeless. He remarks to O'Leary that "the more homes you build, the more homeless there are".
O'Leary himself runs an office that looks across the Liffey to the Irish Financial Services Centre.
He lives in a mansion behind electronic gates with his wife, who arrives home laden with designer shopping, and their teenage son (played by Briain Gleeson, the actor's real-life son) who espouses Marxist-Leninist pretensions while living a comfortable life of leisure, golf and skiing.
The movie saves its most scathing attack for a sequence set in the A&E department of a Dublin hospital, which resembles a scene from a horror movie. In this chaos, there are long queues, faces covered in blood, strung-out drug addicts, fights contained by security staff, and corridors lined on both sides with patients on trolleys.
Earlier this year, in interviews on radio and television and in this newspaper, Brendan Gleeson spoke out strongly against the state of the health services in the city.
Boorman's robust film is certain to provoke even more media coverage when it goes on release at Irish cinemas from November 10th.