Because your correspondent hails from County Monaghan, I am subject – like all Monaghan people – to a lifelong ban on saying anything negative about Neil Jordan’s 1997 movie “The Butcher Boy”. How can you criticise a film, after all, when several of your own cousins – and indeed anybody who is anybody in Monaghan – were cast as extras in it, and got a lifelong story about the time they acted alongside Brendan Gleeson, Sinead O’Connor, and Stephen Rae?
For those of you who’ve never seen it, the movie is a slightly dystopian tale of a young man who is badly damaged by abusive parents and, naturally, abusive priests. He eventually takes it upon himself to commit a horrendous murder, is caught, and imprisoned. The movie’s sympathies, though, lie firmly with the protagonist, and we see the absurdity of the world through his eyes.
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