The Ballykissangelization of Ireland

Abstract

It is ironic that a country which established its national identity largely through recourse to historical and mythical narratives has now, with equal fervour, adopted a policy of commodifying those narratives for the purposes of developing its second largest industry, tourism. It is a further irony that the major consumers of Irish heritage tourism are the former colonizers, the British. Irish culture e nds itself in a double bind, promoting itself through its past, whilst simultaneously denying much of what is signie cant in that past. This cultural imperative has given rise in turn to a specie c cycle of e lms made in and about Ireland, an Irish heritage cinema. A parallel discourse has emerged in television representations, typie ed by the highly successful series Ballykissangel. The regressive discourses of these heritage productions trade on a very specie c image of Irishness which has resonances for the way in which areas such as community, gender and history/the past are depicted. The evolution of the stereotype of the ‘Irish Paddy’ has already been widely discussed; this article focuses less on how that particular e gure has transferred into recent e lm and television works than on other aspects of comic representations of Irishness, in particular how themes of interdependency have been treated historically and in the present. This article emphasizes comedy and its centrality to the heritage cinema and related television programmes. The kind of pleasures offered by comedies have tended to obscure their value as cultural documents. For example, no serious academic work has been carried out on Ballykissangel or the earlier British comedies set in Ireland, which function simultaneously as post-colonial texts and as pleasurable outings for the vicarious heritage tourist. My emphasis is on how the texts circulate between English and Irish audiences and e lm makers and to speculate on what these heritage e lms can tell us about the complex relationship between former colonizer and formerly colonized. Before dee ning in greater detail what is meant by the term heritage cinema, I want briee y to trace its origins both in tourist narratives and earlier comic treatments of the themes of interdependency. Finally, I want to question to what extent we, the Irish, collude in this image-making process and for what reasons.