The dangerous myth-making in the Banshees of Inisherin

I never made it to the end of Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin, which won four Baftas on Sunday and has been tipped for further success at the Oscars next month. Inisherin is a fictional place that apparently translates as ‘Island Ireland’. I know it’s probably churlish of me, but, being Irish, I was turned off by the film’s maudlin sentimentality mixed with self-obsession, self-harm, child abuse, wanton violence, dead pets and suicidal ideation. It bothered me that the film trotted out as many Oirish stereotypes as were in Gone With the Wind, released in 1939. Let me list some of the most obvious of these at the outset. Then allow me to explain what really unsettled me on an intellectual and political level – the larger, insidious falsehood perpetuated by this film about my home country’s history of partition and civil war.

Inisherin presents a very specific version of Ireland – one that gels with the childhood holiday memories of the film’s British-Irish writer who is several generations away from a deep-seated relationship with Ireland’s lands and cultures.