Madam, - The 1919 film promoting the sale of Dáil Bonds and due for auction next week is indeed, as your Fine Art Correspondent Eivlín Roden suggests (The Irish Times, June 4th), of great historical importance. However the 35mm print is not unique.
Other copies of the film have survived and are safely preserved in the Irish Film Archive and in RTÉ.
The film's distribution history, as described both in the correspondence which makes up the auction lot and elsewhere, is a colourful one. The political content was so inflammatory that no cinema owner would risk exhibiting it. The film historian Kevin Rockett has written of the storming of projection boxes by members of the Irish Volunteer Forces and the forced screening of the film at gunpoint.
The production history is equally fascinating. The film was made in St Enda's School, Rathfarnham by John MacDonagh of the Film Company of Ireland - brother of the 1916 martyr, Thomas MacDonagh - during a break in the filming of the feature film Willy Reilly and His Colleen Bawn. The historical significance of both films was explored in an exhibition co-presented by the Irish Film Archive and the Office of Public Works in the Pearse Museum, Rathfarnham in 1989.
I write simply to reassure those who may be concerned about the private sale of public heritage that 35mm preservation copies (duplicated from unstable nitro-cellulose originals) and public access copies are held by the Irish Film Archive and by RTÉ. - Yours, etc,
SUNNIVA O'FLYNN,
Curator,
Irish Film Archive,
Dublin 2.