An election is coming, so “Ireland’s dark past” is back on the media menu. Over the past few weeks, wallowing in misery fantasies of cruel 1980s Ireland has become the media’s unofficial pastime. In this hobby some of our most obsessive columnists have been aided by the release this week of “Small Things Like These” – a film so staggeringly dishonest that the Irish Times film editor had to defend its lies as “fiction” just three days after writing a quasi-review in which he said that the “Ireland the film is set in is a suffocating place. There is a terror of the church. Everyone knows everyone else’s business. A weight is forever pressing.”
So which is it? Was Ireland a dark and suffocating place in the 1980s, or is Small Things Like These a work of fiction? The answer, of course, is “whatever we need it to be in order to advance “the message”.
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