Sarah Harte: McGahern leaves us pondering what we have lost and gained

A scene from 'That They May Face The Rising Sun'.

How times have changed. Director and West Cork man Pat Collins’s film That They May Face the Rising Sun, adapted from John McGahern’s powerful novel, is set in early 1980s rural Ireland, but it may as well be a different country. Watching the film is like stepping through a looking glass. It will scoop you up like a warm hug, and at other times it will break your heart.

Joe and Kate Ruttledge, a writer and an artist, have come back from London to live by the lake. Ireland is economically broken, and the cultural and political power of the unholy nexus of State and Church is beginning to wane.

However, the façade remains, as one character, Patrick, digging his brother’s grave observes, “Isn’t the country still bulling with religion, with people still frightened to wipe their asses with grass in case it’s a sin.”

Cinematically beautiful, it functions like an ad for the green fields of Ireland, the landscape, and the changing seasons are themselves characters. It chronicles the fortunes of the people and the more intangible nation without glorification or vilification. Like it or not, you will be forced down memory lane.

A scene from ‘That They May Face The Rising Sun’. Like it or not, you will be forced down memory lane when watching it.

People wear proper clothes, nobody is encased in athleisure wear which is a welcome relief, cars include a Volkswagen Beetle and Ford Cortina, a telephone service is about to be put in, but people write letters, neighbours knock on doors and visit each other, they drink drive, attend mass, and have a thirst for news in a place where local goings-on are of more import than the outside world.

The Ireland depicted is one where the small moments in life count and where people give each other the gift of time.

However, this is not some simplistic paean to a rose-tinted Ireland that never existed because the film takes us gently by the nose forcing us to confront aspects of life we might like to forget. It’s present in Bill’s character, the product of an Irish orphanage, sent at age 14 to be a farm labourer. Referred to as a ‘slave’, he committed the most grievous sin of having been born out of wedlock.

The Church’s injurious attitude to sexuality and the violence it fostered, both institutional and everyday, simmers beneath the surface and is foregrounded when the largely silent Bill cries out in pain on being questioned about his past. With more than a third of all births outside marriage now, the change in social and sexual mores in Irish society hits you.

Emigration is addressed through Johnny who comes home every summer for a few disruptive weeks to stay with his brother and sister-in-law from where he works in the Ford factory in Dagenham. Although a great fuss is made about the returning Johnny, with cakes being baked, the house being repainted and sirloin steak put on the pan, it belies the reality of more complicated feelings.

The gentle Johnny personifies the great tragedy of Irish men and women who emigrated to England where they remained stranded, neither fully in one place nor the other. “You wouldn’t forget me, Joe,” a stricken Johnny asks, over a pint and whisky chaser.

That They May Face The Rising Sun. The Church’s injurious attitude to sexuality and the violence it fostered, both institutional and everyday, simmers beneath the surface

These are the men and women who took the boat in droves in the second half of the 20th century, to find work, and to flee institutional abuse. Many of them made huge financial and emotional sacrifices to send home valuable remittances but had nowhere to come back to.

One summer spent in London, at age 19, I encountered these ageing Irish men exiled from their tribe, from their villages, crossroads, and fields.

They worked as casual labourers on the building sites and cashed their cheques in the Archway Tavern on a Friday night drinking their pay, the living embodiment of, I drink therefore I am. The Irish in Britain form the largest Irish-born community outside of Ireland. Late last year Ireland’s Minister for International Development and Diaspora Sean Fleming TD announced the highest budget allocation ever for 2024, €15,395m, for the Irish Emigrant Support Programme (ESP) two decades after the fund was first set up, indicating that the Irish State has slowly woken up to the plight of the diaspora and the duty of care owed.

Not to minimise the impact of modern emigration on those who leave and those who stay behind, but one thing that stands out is that although the housing crisis ensures that many of our adult children have left because it is beyond them to rent flats, never mind get on the housing ladder, it is fatuous to draw a comparison to the Johnnies some of whom were barely literate and struggled to write a letter.

Most of our kids leave as young Europeans, with educational credentials in their back pocket, and a surer sense of their own identity in the wider world hopefully with the choice to return if we can sort out housing.

The economic reality of the rural idyll is not elided. We see the squalor of neighbour Patrick’s house, the damp, the filth, the lack of comfort that many people take for granted now where houses are insulated and heated.

Patrick takes to the bed when he is depressed. A man of exceptional intelligence who like many of the characters didn’t get their chance, his thwarted intellect twists and bends.

This frustration bursts up like a geyser in caustic enquiries to Kate: “When will you make those pictures of yours pay”, and “Will you never have children?”

When Johnny confesses that he is now working in the factory canteen, hoovering the floor, and cleaning the toilets, commenting “Sure you’d hardly call it work at all,” Patrick delivers a lacerating summation of Johnny’s life, “You made the mistake of your life when you left,” to go “cleaning English jacks”.

There is joy too in this film, a certain slow courtesy, and refinement of speech and manner. We have a wedding that will make you smile. And a funeral where the great paradox of Catholicism and its place in the national identity is faced.

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It is the same Catholicism that tossed Bill on the slagheap that gives us a captivating, deeply moving scene when the neighbours gather at a wake to keep vigil for Johnny and its cultural specificity cannot be denied. They intone the rosary, its hypnotic beat, serving to still the faint hysteria of a sudden, sad death, bound by a faith in something that is not institutional or engrained in doctrine but instinctive, and rooted in the tight-knit community and the people. I defy you not to have a lump in your throat.

The film has just opened in cinemas around the country, and I can honestly say, it’s been a long time since I enjoyed something as much. Long after the credits roll, you’re left pondering what we have lost, and what we have gained.

To describe it as slow-moving is to miss the point. Do yourself a favour and go and see it because as Johnny would have said it’s “A1, completely alphabetical.”