Sir - Hugh Linehan takes me to task (August 16th) for failing to discuss Irish films "produced in a variety of different circumstances since 1988", in my keynote address to the University of Virginia conference on Irish cinema last May.
For the record, among the films - I discussed (some in extensive detail) were Cathal Black's Korea (1995), Jim Sheridan's The Field (1990), Mike Newell's Into the West (1993), Neil Jordan's The Miracle (1991), Thaddeus O'Sullivan's December Bride (1990), Stephen Frear's The Snapper (1993), Margo Harkin's Hush a Bye Baby (1989) and Louis Lentin's recent television documentary Dear Daughter (1996) hardly a negligible sample. Indeed I went further and argued that some films set ostensibly in the past, such as Korea, bear the stamp of Ireland in the 1990s and are all the more powerful for that.
Hugh Linehan then states that "there was little or no reference to Paddy Breathnach's Ailsa or Gerard Stembridge's Guiltrip." He even goes so far as to wonder if I had seen Ailsa - this notwithstanding the fact that I organised and conducted a panel discussion/ interview featuring Paddy Breathnach's Ailsa at the conference he describes. (Incidentally, I also discussed Guiltrip in the light of other recent works, such as the Mike Winterbottom/Roddy Doyle television drama Family (1994), in my main lecture, but again this escaped I(is eye).
It is absurd to expect a single lecture, with a specific thematic focus, to address the entire range of films made in the last ten years - even more so when it was expressly introduced as part of a book which I am writing on recent Irish cinema. State of the nation addresses and sweeping generalisations belong to another era and do less than justice to the "complexities and tensions" (as he describes it) of contemporary Irish cinema. The film makers themselves have moved into the 1990s but your critic, with his seeming nostalgia for a catch all inclusiveness, remains rooted in the past.
In the original version of his artilce (in Film Ireland 54), Hugh Linehan wrote that as an active participant in the conference he makes no claims to objectivity" in his account of its proceedings. It is a pity that, writing as a professional Journalist in your pages, he did not attach a similar disclaimer to the rehashed version, so that readers could interpret it accordingly. - Yours etc.,
Dublin City University
Dublin 9.