One option for those seeking refuge from the general election campaign was the cinema for the film adaptation of Claire Keegan’s novella Small Things Like These. Bathed in Dickensian darkness, it tells a well-known story due to the success of Keegan’s book, which is now also on the Leaving Certificate curriculum.
Cillian Murphy – who plays the central character, coalman Bill Furlong, working in New Ross in the mid 1980s, who happens on the underbelly of the town’s Magdalene laundry – has spoken of how the main challenge was to stay faithful to the book and tell the story “in a gentle, delicate way, leaving enough space for the audience to come in to it ... to find their own way”.
There is little gentle, however, in how the film has been promoted, with the concerted framing of the 1980s as an era of unmitigated harshness and cruelty. Murphy offered the blanket summary that is now commonplace: the period in which the novel is set is “like the f**king dark ages compared to now”. Of course it is, as we are now so prone to a historical narrative that presents our story as a linear tale of darkness to light. Murphy suggests in looking at the film, “it could be the 1950s in many ways”.
Keegan’s brilliant writing, along with a skilful screen adaptation and a stellar cast, create much to admire, but the film raises a wider question about the communication of our history as one giant, black cloud occasionally interrupted by a lone, bright star.
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Just as the film was released, a leading Irish music producer declared in a radio interview, when looking back on 1984, that “literally everything was black and white ... everything was illegal”. An Ireland that also included such things as Music Television USA, shiny new Dart carriages, the Hothouse Flowers, revulsion at the treatment of Joanne Hayes at the Kerry Babies Tribunal and a determination to liberalise the laws on contraception, is sidelined in the process.
Also this month, a leading Irish television critic, in reviewing a documentary that covered the 1980s, was prompted to assert “the past is a kind of hell, strange and full of suffering”.
Keegan’s book, as a work of fiction, takes liberties with chronology, but rightly dwells much on ethos, atmosphere, symbols and inheritances. The laundry in New Ross closed in 1967, though the last Irish Magdalene laundry was not closed until 1996 and the last mother and baby home closed in 1998. The buildings that incarcerated women deemed to have “transgressed” moral principles were still apparent all over the country in the 1980s. The Good Shepherd convent looms large in Keegan’s book, “a powerful-looking place on the hill at the far side of the river with black, wide-open gates”. Deference to church authority was expected and mostly given. At one point Furlong says pointedly in relation to the clergy, “surely they’ve only as much power as we give them”.
But new criticisms were being voiced in the Ireland of 1985, including by a small group of women who protested outside the Archbishop’s palace in Dublin with a placard announcing they were “women against bishops against women”. They declared their dissent the first of a “series of acts of female defiance.”
Fine Gael’s former minister for agriculture Austin Deasy also crossed swords with the bishops, insisting the government would legislate “without consulting the interests of any religious group”. His colleague, former minister for education Gemma Hussey, who died this week, was vocal about introducing sex education and the need in Ireland for women who were “good, strong feminists”.
Numerous tragic events disturbed the public conscience during the 1980s as scandals around female sexuality and reproduction created striking moments, images and sorrow. But they also opened debate about church-state relations and encouraged more stories to be shared, including on RTÉ radio’s most listened to programme, the Gay Byrne Show.
Despite these currents, traditional power alliances continued to cause much damage, but balancing the “common good” with “moral principles” and defining them exclusively in Catholic terms was coming under considerable scrutiny. These themes are relevant to Keegan’s book, tensions that exposed fault lines in the 1980s that continued to widen and prompted individual acts of defiance and the generation of new discourses about previously taboo subjects in the midst of many ongoing silences.
Keegan writes of Furlong: “Once more the ordinary part of him simply wanted to be rid of this and get on home.” While there was much obedience on display, some of the muteness and the unwritten contracts, as suggested by the actions of Furlong, began to be challenged. Keegan’s focus on these shifts should not be drowned out in the embrace of an easier, blanket narrative of hell and suffocation. We were more complicated than that and the 1980s was not, despite the oft repeated mantra, “another country”.