Why won’t McIlroy just say that he’s Irish?
He’s an Ulster Protestant who believes a post-Brexit united Ireland is possible. And as an actor who has always been proud of his own heritage, Stephen Rea can’t understand...
Ireland’s relationship with England hasn’t been a happy one
HE annoys me’, says Stephen Rea of golf superstar Rory McIlroy’s refusal to represent Ireland on a national stage. ‘He had two uncles who were Gaelic footballers and he had an uncle who I think was killed by loyalists and his entire career has been built through Irish golf. And he is a Catholic. I think that he went to…’ Rea pauses for a moment and waves his hand apologetically.
‘This is terrible to be talking about it, he is a wonderful golfer and I just wish he would play for Ireland. He has benefited from the Irish golf structure. What’s the big deal? Maybe he is frightened. Maybe he is frightened of loyalists.’
Rea takes a sip of his tea and looks over at Irish director Lance Daly, alongside him doing interviews for Black 47, Rea’s new film, which has been described as a famine western.
An Ulster Protestant who married Dolours Price, a former Provisional IRA bomber and hunger striker who later became a critic of Sinn Féin, Rea retains a fiercely proud vision of Ireland. So much so, that he has been turning down a myriad of twee and patronising scripts that are being churned out by the Hollywood elite. He is very choosy about the roles he picks.
‘I have read a couple of scripts recently that I’m not going to get into, but they are set in Ireland and it is all, pie-in-the-sky stuff. We’re back to kind of “diddley-eye” films, where the Irish are presented as buffoons. And this has been promoted by Irish money,’ he says incredulously.
‘Maybe it’s because people want to portray Irish people now as, “Oh we’re all fine, we’re not nasty people any more, we don’t wear balaclavas any more and our world is good”. I think it’s that. Or maybe it’s simply that the filmmakers haven’t any ideas. They want to do something that’s popular. Maybe sometimes it’s better not to bother.’
Black 47 is a film that pulls few punches, so much so that Rea is not sure how it will go down with our neighbours across the Irish Sea.
‘How will it be received in England? I don’t know,’ he says. ‘They might start disliking us again. They kind of got a little bit used to us.
‘I remember seeing a guy walking around wearing an Irish geansaí in Islington a couple of years ago and thinking that it wasn’t that long ago when you wouldn’t have worn that.’
Though brought up in a Protestant home in East Belfast, Rea is 100 per cent an Irishman who believes a united Ireland would do very well in a post-Brexit world.
‘They are in a state of utter confusion at the minute,’ he says of our near neighbours.
‘They are grasping for the empire of the past and actually Irish people have felt very comfortable with Europe because we are in partnership rather than in submission.
‘I think it has been rather wonderful to hear — not that I am a huge fan of Varadkar — but to hear the Irish Government taking on the English Government with the backing of Europe. In a confident way as well. I think they should go harder — as long as we don’t have a hard border.
‘I just don’t get it. The whole country — and by that I include the North as well — would do very well, just the whole place being with Europe.
‘The relationship with England has not been a happy one, I think I’m allowed to say that?’
Black 47 is the first film to tackle the Famine atrocity on the big screen, and Rea firmly believes that thematically Lance Daly is on a similar path to Neil Jordan’s masterpiece, The Crying Game.
The 1992 Oscar-winning film was centred around the Troubles but Rea insists that it was far more.
‘It was not a Troubles movie — it was about identity,’ he says. ‘What is a soldier? What is a black British soldier? All of those themes.
‘This is what we have done in Black 47, because you have this driving force of a narrative which is very compelling. It’s not that the Famine is a background — it’s the core of the
movie. You have ways of seeing it that doesn’t leave you in a state of utter depression which is what Troubles movies are. I was never really in that many Troubles movies. They are too awful, because the reality was too awful.’
The new film is written and directed by Daly and stars Australian actor James Frecheville as Martin Feeney, a former British soldier who returns to Ireland in 1847 to find his family and his people have been destroyed by two long years of famine. His mother starved to death while his brother was hanged by the English. With little else to live for, he sets out on a destructive path of revenge.
But as is often the case, it’s Rea who really stands out on film in his role as Conneely, an opportunistic ‘paddy’ who offers his services as a translator to the English soldiers.
It was the wit and craft of the script that sucked him in.
‘Fantastic lines,’ he says with a chuckle. ‘Everyone else is sad and miserable but he has the good lines because he lives in both worlds. He can see and knows what’s going on from both the Irish and the British perspectives. That’s what makes him interesting.
‘Look, I just read the script and that was enough. I don’t know how a character emerges but costume helped and then more Gaeilge was put into the movie which I think helped.’
There is, Rea says, a hard truth to this film. ‘It isn’t just a narrative drive for the sake of it,’ he insists. ‘This movie has the truth in it and that’s what’s great.
‘It’s this fractured society trying to deal with the Famine. Also I like riding mules — Mary the mule. The wrangler couldn’t even get the mule to move. I understood what stubborn as a mule actually meant. That mule was as stubborn as the DUP.’
Rea hopes the film will strike a chord with the Irish-American population in the US, as many of their ancestors were forced to leave Ireland at that time. It was announced this month that US distributor IFC Films has signed a deal to roll the film out in the US on September 28.
The film also stars Barry Keoghan, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Freddie Fox, Moe Dunford and Sarah Greene.
Rea hopes that the Irish public will engage with it in the same way they did with another historic movie he did with Neil Jordan, Michael Collins.
‘I think that when we did Michael Collins — and I don’t mean to keep going back to Neil — but there was a great sense here in Ireland of “we are telling our own stories”,’ he says. ‘Even if you disagreed with certain elements of the version, it was ourselves doing it and everyone on the streets from the extras up felt that this was a real moment.
‘It is the same with this film. It’s not some American version of the Famine, it is us telling it with the sort of scrutiny that an Irish person can bring to it.
BLACK 47 is in cinemas from next Friday
I like mules but that mule was as stubborn as the DUP