The Irish film that went down with the Lusitania

On 22 September 1914, the movie Ireland a Nation premiered at New York’s Forty-Fourth Street Theatre. It was written, directed and produced by Walter MacNamara, a Lismore man based in the United States. The movie portrayed ‘the Irish struggles against British rule’ between 1798 and 1914.

It proved popular with Irish-Americans. In Boston, it pulled in large audiences; in Chicago, it is said, it ran for 20 consecutive weeks.

It was not until two years later that the movie reached Ireland. The first print of the film dispatched by McNamara in 1915 was lost when the Lusitania was sunk off the Old Head of Kinsale. A second copy failed to make it through a submarine blockade.

A print of the film finally arrived in Dublin late in 1916, to a city still bearing the scars of the Easter Rising. The distributor submitted the movie to the military press censor; he insisted on a number of cuts (scenes showing soldiers breaking up a hillside Mass, the execution of Robert Emmett, the flying of the Irish flag….) as well as an inter-scene title that announced: ‘A price of £100 dead or alive on the head of every priest’.

The cuts were made; ads appeared in the press and posters went up around the city. The first performance would take place at the Rotunda cinema in the city centre on Mon 8.1.17 (for one week only, declared the poster).

An inspector of the Dublin Metropolitan Police went to the afternoon showing on the 8th. The movie was applauded throughout, he reported, ‘except some slight hissing, when Lord Castlereagh and Major Sirr were exhibited’ (the latter killed United Irishman Lord Edward Fitzgerald in 1798).

One viewer said that the audience ‘was determined to make the most of this opportunity to celebrate a still imagined Irish nation’. Patriotic tunes played by the orchestra ‘were received with loud and frequent applause’. At the last Monday night performance, many in the audience sang ‘A Nation once again’. The nationalist Freeman’s Journal was enthusiastic about the movie, the unionist Irish Times less so.

The Tuesday performances proved even more unruly. A military observer thought that the movie was ‘likely to cause disaffection’. Witnesses reported on the ‘seditious and disloyal conduct’ it caused. Displeased with the goings-on, the General Officer Commanding British forces in Ireland, Bryan Mahon, banned the film throughout the country. The movie posters on O’Connell St were pasted over. The film had played for two days only (it was next shown in the country when the Free State came about in 1922).

Ireland a Nation was one of the most notable movies of the decade in Ireland. In the shadow of the Easter Rising, its title alone proved a great draw for nationalists.

In the US, at a time when many British propaganda films were being screened, the Irish American press gave the film a lot of attention.

After its 1914 premier, it was screened in New York again the following year at the St Patrick’s Day ‘Monster Irish Entertainment and Ball’, and also in 1917 at a shindig organised by the Ancient Order of Hibernians.

It reappeared in 1920 when it played for three weeks at the Lexington Theatre in Manhattan (the program also featured Larry Reilly and his Irish pipers!).

The Gaelic American newspaper said that ‘President De Valera has personally sanctioned Ireland a Nation as a picturization of the reality’

All quotes from: “Would We Ever Have It in Reality?” Ireland a Nation “For Two Days Only” in January 1917 | Early Irish Cinema