Podcast: Bobby Sands film subverts ‘easily served up narratives’

Thirty-five years after the hunger strikes that led to the death of Bobby Sands and nine other republican inmates of the Maze prison, Brendan J Byrne's new documentary 66 Days is a part of the "first draft of history" – and could not have been made much sooner, he says on this week's Off Topic podcast.

"I don't think [the film] could have been made 10 years ago, in documentary terms. The people who fund such films, I don't think would have had the confidence to fund it. The furore which has greeted it among certain narrow-minded sections of the Northern Ireland community would have been more viscerally against it."

The film has been criticised by some in Northern Ireland (including, predictably, some who had not seen it) for glorifying Sands and terrorism, something Byrne calls “mildly depressing”.

“It does present a picture of a certain level of denial within the Unionist community, because they don’t want to believe that there’s anything to do with the failed Northern Ireland state that helped create the IRA in the first place,” he says.

“That’s their Pandora’s box. If they lift the lid off that, that really questions their entire political ethos.”

For Byrne, the film seeks to subvert past “strict and easily served up narratives” and give a younger generation an understanding of the trying times their parents lived through.

“I think younger people struggle to understand the narrative, they struggle to believe there was a conflict where they live, be it North or South of the Border”.

Also on the podcast, film-maker Henrietta Norton talks about her documentary Born and Bred which looks at the legacy of the Troubles today, as it affects the lives of four men.

“I wanted to explore a contemporary story, because I felt while there were many ways of reflecting on the Troubles and the past and talking about things that had happened, actually I wanted to explore where are we in 2015,” she says. “Whilst there is a political peace that has been established, is there a human peace?”