Ummmm I happen to be a great admirer of Miss O'Hara but I digress... Have you seen...
The Celts
Walking Ned Devine
The Quiet Man
Angela's Ashes
My Left Foot
I love Maureen O'Hara too, but the movies she starred in about Ireland weren't really all that definative of anything except the universally accepted myths about Ireland.
Angela's Ashes, My Left Foot, and the Magdalene Sister's are all part of that Misery-Porn genre in it's Irish form. While they do tell interesting stories none of them could be said to be quintissentially definative of Ireland, and in my view they've contributed to a lot of misunderstandings about this country around the world. There's no doubt those movies needed to be made, but in the absence of anything to counterbalance them and fill out the picture of Ireland I feel like they distort somewhat.
The Celts I admit to being unfamiliar with...
Waking Ned Devine doesn't cut it IMO, it's just so "Oirish" and cutsey, and it really would have people believe we're all a bunch of bog-trotting eejits.
The Quiet Man is in most respects a great movie, and it's unusual in that it bucks a lot of the clichés, but if I'm honest whenever I watch it I can't help feeling that it could have been set anywhere in Europe that happened to be remote, sparsely populated and culturally traditional. I also feel like it's about how incredible the performances in it are, rather than saying much about Ireland.
The only decent movie I've seen about Ireland that I had few reservations about was The Wind that Shakes the Barley. Again though that's mining a cultural and historic seam which is important and needs to be explored but which I feel has been explored lots already where a vast field of other stories about Ireland remain untold and unexplored to the detriment of people's understanding of what this country is actually like. I used to live in the part of the country The Wind that Shakes the Barley is set in so I can vouch for much of its veracity too.
Perhaps I was exaggerating when I said every movie made about this country sucks ass, but it's not far off true nonetheless.
