Irish Examiner View: ‘Banshee’ wails

True, not everyone greets McDonagh’s creative output with acclamation, but to suggest its reflection of Ireland during the Civil War is “inaccurate” and that its portrayal of Irish people is “moronic” and “offensive” rather suggests that movie-goers who have sent their criticisms to the Irish Film Classification Office cannot be familiar with the body of work which has brought him fame and fortune and a wide audience. Picture: Jonathan Hession/Searchlight Pictures

It’s hard not to do a double take when someone complains about the portrayal of 1920s Ireland in Martin McDonagh’s Oscar-nominated film The Banshees of Inisherin. 

True, not everyone greets McDonagh’s creative output with acclamation, including columnists within this newspaper. 

But to suggest its reflection of Ireland during the Civil War is “inaccurate” and that its portrayal of Irish people is “moronic” and “offensive” rather suggests that movie-goers who have sent their criticisms to the Irish Film Classification Office cannot be familiar with the body of work which has brought him fame and fortune and a wide audience, despite regular criticisms that he has resorted to paddywhackery.

While his early plays are set in actual locations in Galway and on the Aran Islands, and provide a vehicle for exaggerated stereotypes, extravagant plots, and a mordant black humour, in recent years McDonagh has deftly blurred links between reality and imagination.

Thus, in The Pillowman, we never learn the name of the totalitarian state in which the writer Katurian and his brother Michal are left to the not-so-tender mercies of two detectives investigating a series of child murders. 

Nor is there a town called Ebbing in Missouri to celebrate Oscar victory on its three billboards. McDonagh says he invented the name because he liked the sound the syllables made. Nor, indeed, is there an Inisherin, although there was an unpublished play called 'The Banshees of Inisheer'.

The writer and director, born in Camberwell, London, to Irish parents, has got his own views on location: “Though it may not seem like it, I never try to write about a place, per se; it’s always, first and last, about story. Story is everything. Story and a bit of attitude.”

Whether this satisfies the complainants is doubtful. But perhaps, like Pádraic and Colm in Banshees, some form of reconciliation can be found between those who are seeking offence and those who are prepared to provide it.