A Ballyfermot child discusses religion in The Rocky Road To Dublin
Rocky Road to Dublin indeed! The film is anticlerical, antigovernment, anti-G.A.A, anti-censor, anti-Abbey Theatre – anti EVERYTHING.
-Evening Herald,1968.
I was saddened today to hear that Peter Lennon has passed away. Lennon was a renowned journalist and the man behind the groundbreaking documentary The Rocky Road To Dublin, which blew many cobwebs off of what people thought Ireland was and showed what lay underneath in many regards. The documentary featured people as diverse as Seán Ó Faoláin and Conor Cruise O’Brien, and forced many to look at the role of the church in Irish society. At the time the documentary was produced, in the late 1960s, Lennon was based in Paris as a journalist for The Guardian and it was upon a return trip to Dublin that he decided to produce The Rocky Road… a critical analysis of Irish society at the time.
It was 2004 before the film was restored by the Irish Film Board. It had been the victim of a de-facto banning here in Ireland for years before that. Lennon and the team behind the work, like so many others who dared question the society of the period, found themselves effectively silenced.
Was there a revolution in Ireland? “A rebellion led by poets and socialists”, as Lennon described it, had led to a strange and conservative country, and Ó Faoláin goes further on film to call it “a country without moral courage” and a society “in constant alliance with a completely oppressive,regressive and uncultivated church.”
I’ve always loved the scenes in Ballyfermot, a corner of the city close to my heart and family. The young children shown are happier than any you’ll find today, despite living in a society defined by inequality.
We owe Peter Lennon so much for The Rocky Road To Dublin.
This excellent documentary is also worth a look, from Icarus Films:
This documentary reunites director Peter Lennon and cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who recount the making of their then controversial but now classic documentary on Ireland in the Sixties. Rocky Road to Dublin was screened for only a few weeks at a single Dublin theater and was critically condemned and accused of being Communist-funded. But as Lennon explains, while the Irish saw Rocky Road to Dublin as an insult, the French saw it as a film.
Click on the book for more.
Click on the book for more.
Donal
Ciarán
Sam
Come Here To Me! 
A courageous individual who’s played his part. The Rocky Road should be show every time someone claims no one knew what was going on.
A sad day. He was a great guy and the Rocky Road was a great achievement. It’s banning said it all.
I was sort of involved at the time, much to my shame:
http://photopol.com/religion/religion.html#rocky
Speaking as an Irish mother, the Irish people, per se, have a great deal of Growing Up to do. Peter’s Lennon’s film Rocky Road to Dublin is not one that is discussed amongst the Irish (social scene). Most Irish people have never even heard of Rocky Road; if they have, they act like they’ve never heard of it, or Peter Lennon himself.
Irish society has a very long way to go before it come to terms with its Roman Catholic history.
It’s not just Peter Lennon the forget. They also have a blind spot for the Ryan, Murphy and Ferns reports and the fact that many RC perpetrators of child rape are still walking among them. Brady can grin smugly in Armagh knowing there is no outcry for his arrest. Anyone else involved in covering up crime would be charged.