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Over two decades ago, I remember planning my first trip to Europe, which was the Republic of Ireland with the United Kingdom. As a twenty-two-year-old girl, this tour was not really meant for me. But, my weirdly unsettling experiences with sexual harassment from men, I became greatly fascinated by Ireland. Most of Irish culture’s success in the United States is due to their superb propaganda strategy but seeing a tank crawling down a park road in Dublin, for me, was an experience like no other. It was that day when I decided to shed my monotonous life and find out how a painful and violent story like that of the Irish people turned into a harmless mythology fed to the world every St. Patrick’s day.
Having read numerous books and watched various films covering the Potato famine, the 1916 uprising, and especially The Troubles which were in the news frequently, I was astonished. In the latter narrative, the focus was on Northern Ireland, and fierce fighting between pro-Irish unification and the British troops with their loyalist Irish supporters. The Republic and diaspora communities, as I suspected, only appeared on the fringes of my knowledge, merging with the grey area stemming from their depiction. So it was when I heard about first-time feature director Luke Hanlon’s new movie, The Troubles: A Dublin Story. It felt like an opportunity to learn something that connected with my tank sighting all those years ago.
The Northsider Irishman indeed wondered why has the story of Dublin never been told. The same question intrigued Hanlon, a public-housing child, when growing up he too wondered, and there was an answer. For decades now, he had the intention and concept for ‘The Troubles: A Dublin Story’ onto his mind. He personally knew republicans from his surroundings, as most ordinary people struggle of unification for a variety of noble and selfish reasons.
After rounding up the meager €15,000 that he had at his fingertips, Hanlon was able to achieve his goals through tactics that would be appreciated by directors at Hollywood’s Poverty Row.
The notion of leprechauns and shamrocks gets obliterated as we are thrust into the brutality of the ensuing conflict. A man is captured by some “hard men” types for what appears to be interrogatory purposes. Things aren’t quite going well for the guise of interrogators, so one of the men opts to pull his side piece and leave to take care of business with their prisoner. The poor man has the possibility of being a republican who has committed an unacceptable act or a loyalist spy legend, it’s clear that no matter what happens to him, he is not going to be emerging from this scenario alive.
Bobby Sands was one of the more notorious republican inmates of Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison, and his death during a hunger strike seeking political prisoner status for himself and others was widely publicized. Soon after, there were reports of riots in the street in Belfast alongside a television broadcast about the death. This scene was very catalytic for Sean (Ray Malone) and Frank (Adam Redmond) Shannon, who are less than a year apart in age and referred to as the Shannon twins as a joke. They reach out to Declan (William Delaney), who had a reputation of being in the Provisional IRA, and informs him of their desire to fight. Sooner or later, they are brought into the IRA and started receiving menial tasks to test their potential.
Hanlon is cautious in presenting the world of Sean and Frank. They have had thier share of problems with the law- but that does not seem to be an unusual situation in their underperforming area. Frank resides in his childhood home, where he takes care of his father (Philip James Russell) who is afflicted with dementia and various physical ailments. The more reckless and hot tempered of the siblings, Sean, marries a pretty red haired lady Marie (Sarah Hayden) with whom he has several kids. He does seem to be a good father, but he is physically and psychologically abusive towards Marie.
Finally, the brothers are given guns and instructed to rob a post office to financially assist the cause. During the robbery, Sean punches the clerk behind the counter, but as fortune would have it, a police car happens to be passing by. When Sean tries to escape with the clerk hostage, Frank surrenders to the IRA superior and follows his order. Their two-year prison sentences legitimise them with their IRA comrades, that is, until Frank starts a relationship with a barmaid from Belfast (Sophia Adli) who works at his local pub.
While it’s easy to believe that oppression and terrorism go hand in hand, what eludes understanding is the fact that violence and crime have innumerable opportunist criminals that lack interest in proper decorum. This so-called ‘freedom fighting’ is nothing but a veil for such psychopaths and sociopaths that stalk the world. Sean and Frank are tasked with shooting one of their utterly useless comrades in the kneecap, who they absurdly ask whether he wishes to undress, so the bullet isn’t wasted on him. But then Declan teams up with a rich American businessman that had the capability to guerilla smuggle arms into the country. Everyone has different allegiances, but one thing that remains constant, clearer than day, is that such sociopaths and psychopaths view freedom and a set of principles as mere conveniences.
Sean envisions the fight as a competition of Mortal Combat, an outlet for his rage, but, ultimately detrimental to the well-being of his marriage. On the contrary, Frank appears like a staunch supporter but reality toughens him and the Provos’ long reach destroys any hope he has of anything other than the movement to call home. One simply needs to remember the Real IRA, who refused to accept the 1998 ceasefire that came alongside the Good Friday Agreement. The armistice was tremendously dissatisfying for them as their nefarious deeds were far too financially beneficial to give up.
The film gains much of itse realism from Hanlon’s resourcefulness, including his effort to track down the location where a military ex-friend used to teach him and his crew how to perform checkpoint exercises, and even fetch a military tank. The script is unrestricted, freer than one could imagine. When Marie embellishes her statement to Sean with the phrase “and I hate you” the audience can feel as if they are being spat at. While the pairing of all American blond Redmond and the equally all American dark haired Malone as the siblings was very Bernstein and Woodwardish, those performers along with the other members of the cast do adequately provide us with the normalcy of existing in the backdrop. The subtitling is done well, and with grief and revenge of contending injury, the epilogue’s terms is left ambiguous, which expresses the malign emotion ideal man.
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