Peter Lennon’s 1968 documentary about the state of Ireland in that transformative decade

By

CAHIR O'DOHERTY,

Irish Central Staff Writer

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Still from 'Rocky Road to Dublin'

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A Rocky Road to Independence

Ireland in the 1960s was a nation frozen in time. While Beatlemania, Vietnam, hippies and free love gripped the west, we had Father Michael Cleary (the singing priest) and the Irish Censorship Board.

Our church-controlled educational system produced young students who fretted about original sin years before they were capable of conceiving one. Our government acted as if church and state were indistinguishable. We were shut-in’s, defiantly turning our backs against the 20th century and the modern tide.

In Rocky Road to Dublin, Peter Lennon’s recently restored and re-released 1968 documentary about the state of Ireland in that transformative decade, Lennon captures a nation teetering on the cusp of enormous social change. It makes for startling viewing, and the Irish Film Institute is to be commended for placing this groundbreaking film before the public again.

It’s a true saying -- prophets are never recognized in their own land. Especially when they’re holding a bright polished mirror up to their fellow citizens. But it’s usually love, and not contempt, that drives them.

In 1968 the majority of Irish critics were profoundly shocked by Lennon’s home truth telling, to the point where they blasted him for his lack of patriotism rather than admitting he had a point.

How did it happen? How did Ireland turn the key on itself and the 20th century for so long?

Well, according to writer Sean O’Faolain, we betrayed our republican ideals almost immediately after achieving independence.

James Joyce knew all about it. So did George Bernard Shaw, John McGahern, Edna O’Brien, Brendan Behan, Austin Clarke, Benedict Kiely, Kate O’Brien, Frank O’Connor and O’Faolain himself.

Each of them (and many others) had their books banned for decades by censorship laws that the writer Robert Graves called “the fiercest literary censorship this side of the Iron Curtain.”

In 1926, in a foretaste of what was to come, the then Irish Minister for Justice Kevin O’Higgins appointed the Red China sounding Committee on Evil Literature. The committee consisted of three laymen and two clergymen who decided that it was the duty of the state to take action to prevent the circulation of literature considered to be obscene and morally corrupting. Within a year they had created the draconian Irish Censorship Board.

For decades before we were celebrating our great Irish writers, we were dismissing them as deviants and lunatics and depriving them of their livelihoods. We even had our moral watchdogs to sound the alarm at the first sign of ideological impurity.

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