Jim Nolan talks blueshirts, the devil, and all that jazz

Jim Nolan tells Marjorie Brennan how his play is inspired by the triumph of the human spirit in the face of fundamentalist hysteria.

ON New Year’s Day 1934, Fr Peter Conifrey led a march through Mohill, Co Leitrim, in which demonstrators called on the Government to ban jazz music and all foreign dances in Ireland. Jazz, the campaign argued, was an “engine of hell” deployed to do the devil’s work.

This little-known event sowed the seeds of inspiration for writer Jim Nolan’s latest play Dreamland, set in a village in the south coast of Ireland in 1934.