To renew a subscription please login first

BACK TO SCHOOL

Published in Issue 5 (September/October 2023), Volume 31

By Saskia Vermeulen

Above: A scene from Cathal Gaffney’s Give Up Yer Aul’ Sins (2001). (IFI)

The Irish Film Institute (IFI) is delighted to partner with History Ireland and welcome readers to visit the treasure trove of film material available for free, anywhere in the world, on the IFI Archive Player (https://ifiarchiveplayer.ie/). This virtual viewing room presents the remarkable moving-image collections held in the IFI Irish Film Archive, giving audiences across the globe instant access to this rich heritage. With over 900 films available on the IFI Archive Player, the material has been curated to give audiences a taste of the breadth and depth of the collections preserved by the archive.

GLOUCESTER STREET

Father Jack Delaney / 1930s / 7 mins

Above: A scene from Father Jack Delaney’s Gloucester Street (1930s). (IFI)

Father Jack Delaney served as a parish priest in the 1930s and 1940s, primarily on Seán McDermott Street, Rutland Street and Gardiner Street. His films of school events, tenement life, religious processions and scenes within the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity Convent (which housed a Magdalene laundry) provide us with a glimpse of life in Dublin at the time. Gloucester Street (which became Seán McDermott Street in 1933) is alive with activity: children play and grapple for the camera’s attention, teachers play schoolyard games with pupils and women reluctantly pose for the camera. Moments in time are captured in a heavily populated, inner-city Dublin neighbourhood.

GIVE UP YER AUL’ SINS

Cathal Gaffney / 2001 / 4 mins

Give Up Yer Aul’ Sins, directed by Cathal Gaffney of Brown Bag Films, humorously animates original audio recordings of Dublin schoolchildren made by their teacher, Peg Cunningham, in the 1960s. In the short film, a documentary crew arrives to record the activities of the classroom, where Mary retells, in her own imaginative way, the Bible story of John the Baptist. Thirty years earlier, the boys and girls of Rutland Street National School were filmed by Father Jack Delaney in the silent amateur film Gloucester Street.

Saskia Vermeulen is the IFI Digital Platforms Manager at the Irish Film Institute in Dublin.

On this Day

September 08

1806 Patrick Cotter (46), giant, died. Born in Kinsale, Co. Cork, Cotter was just eighteen when he began exhibiting himself in England as Patrick Cotter O’Brien, ‘a lineal descendant of the old puissant King Brien Boreau’. It was recorded that Cotter ‘had less imbecility of mind than the generality of overgrown persons’ but also had ‘all the weakness of body by which they are characterized. He walked with difficulty, and felt considerable pain when rising up or sitting down.’ He also feared that his remains would be taken by grave-robbers and sold to anatomists. Retiring after some five years on the road, he directed that his casket be encased with lead and interred in a grave secured with iron bars. Thus they remained undisturbed for over a century before being reinterred in a crypt at the Jesuit chapel in Trenchard Street, Bristol, where they still rest. It was established then that he was 8ft. 1in. tall at the time of his death, the first of only seventeen people in medical history to stand at a verified height of 8ft or more.
1966 The first episode of Star Trek, ‘The Man Trap’, was broadcast, in which Captain Kirk faced an alien desperate to suck the salt out of human bodies.
1812 ‘Honest John’ Martin, Young Irelander and Home Rule MP, born in Loughorne, Newry, Co. Down.
1798 The Rising in Connacht ended with the defeat of Jean Joseph Humbert’s French/Irish forces by Crown forces under Lord Lieutenant Cornwallis at the Battle of Ballinamuck, Co. Longford.
1944 The SS Empire Heritage, en route from New York to Liverpool with a cargo of war supplies, was struck by two German torpedoes some fifteen miles off Malin Head, Co. Donegal, with the loss of 113 lives.

BACK TO SCHOOL

Personal Histories

On this Day

September 08