Sheridan to make TV drama based on the Troubles

Acclaimed film director Jim Sheridan plans to make a major television drama series which would hammer a nail into the coffin of the conflict in the North, he revealed today.

The Dubliner, best known for his Oscar-winning movie 'My Left Foot', said he is talking with renowned Belfast film director and screenwriter Terry George about working together on the script.

The pair have teamed up before on widely-lauded films about the conflict including 'In The Name Of The Father', 'The Boxer' – both starring Daniel Day-Lewis - and 'Some Mother’s Son'.

Sheridan said it was an ambition of his to mark an end to the Troubles with a television series that would help Ireland and the wider world understand what led to the decades of murder and violence.

“Everybody goes ’Don’t make a movie about the North’ – I say only make a movie about the North,” he said.

“I think there’s a need for a (television) series to put a coffin nail on the way you think about what the North became.

“If we could get six inch nails and hammer them into the coffin so that particular vampire never came out again, we would be doing a service.”

The six-time Academy Award nominee said he had been talking “quite a bit” with George, who directed the critically-acclaimed 'Hotel Rwanda', about a drama series dealing with how the conflict erupted.

“All the movies that were successful about the North – 'The Crying Game', 'In The Name Of The Father', 'The Boxer' – they were off the scale in comparison to the rest (of Irish films),” he said.

“Because we were defining something for people outside Ireland. It wasn’t really the IRA, it was Marxism versus this, and nationalism and religion.

“That, thankfully, is behind us, but (I want to make) some film or some series that would investigate what went on, what happened to drive people so mad.

“We used to all say in the South: ’Everybody above the Border is a bit cookie up there’. That’s what we used to say. And we still kind of believe it.”

Sheridan said he would make the television series with George but added that raising enough finance could be difficult for a story that the rest of the world believes has moved on.

“It’s a big commitment. You wouldn’t get a lot of money for it because it’s a little corner of the world and a problem that’s over,” he said.

“But just for me, that’s the kind of thing I’d like to see.”

The film director, who also earned praise for his semi-autobiographical 'In America' as well as 2005’s 'Get Rich Or Die Tryin’' starring rapper 50 cent, was speaking after the launch of Ireland’s planned new digital free-to-air film channel – the Irish Film Channel.

The state-funded station which will show Irish and World cinema around the clock is to be up and running by the end of 2009.