When the film-maker Roisin Agnew set about researching a new documentary project, her interest landed first on the Derry Film and Video Workshop but gradually evolved to focus on a specific moment of tension between the media, the British government and the republican movement around censorship during the Troubles.
Her new film, which is called The Ban, focuses on the surreal context of London prohibiting the broadcasting of the voices of figures from Irish republican and loyalist groups, most pointedly Sinn Féin, between 1988 and 1994. The documentary, which clocks in at under half an hour, is a compelling piece of work that uses archive and contemporary interviews with the actors who voiced Sinn Féin representatives – Stephen Rea became the voice of Gerry Adams, for example – along with those figures themselves.
In it, the tension between journalists and government, the inversion of a propaganda gesture, outrageous sectarian violence, and the surrealism of the task the British government set itself combine to create a fascinating meditation on censorship and control.
The film-making process began when Agnew, who is a visiting lecturer at London Film School and a PhD student at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University of London, went to Northern Ireland Screen to watch Acceptable Levels, a 1983 drama about a BBC film crew who, while interviewing a family in the Divis Flats in Belfast, get caught up in a moment of violence, then struggle with how to present contested versions of events.
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After asking to use Northern Ireland Screen’s archive, Agnew watched the Derry workshop’s “seminal film” Mother Ireland, which was directed by Anne Crilly and featured Bernadette Devlin, Nell McCafferty and the late IRA member Mairéad Farrell. “It was finished in and around 1988-1989 but didn’t get broadcast until 1991,” she says. “That’s how I learned more about the broadcasting ban, in terms of how sensitive it was.”
Established in 1984, the Derry Film and Video Workshop was a women-led organisation that emerged from the 1982 Workshop Declaration, under which Britain’s then-nascent Channel 4 provided funding and screen time for film and video collectives. As well as the Derry Film and Video Workshop (which has also been the subject of We Realised the Power of It, a fascinating exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art), recipients included the Black Audio Film Collective; Amber, in Newcastle; the Sankofa workshop; and Retake, an Asian film and video collective.
The workshops made countercinema – films that went against the prevailing narrative. Certainly, Agnew disagrees with the contemporary media narrative that younger people are gravitating towards republican politics from a position of ignorance about the Troubles.
“When I first started doing this project it came at the same time as the rise of Sinn Féin in the Republic and the questions about why so many young people were voting for them,” she says. “In a way there’s a pushback against the Irish press’s idea about that electoral cohort having less knowledge because they don’t have the lived experience of the Troubles.
“Many are actually coming at their vote in an informed fashion ... I’m not just saying that because I come from the generation that didn’t live through the Troubles ... I come back to that material, I’m interested in it, I have researched it. Even in itself the film shows that kind of dismissiveness [by the media] is wrong.”
A “de-colonial discourse” is now under way, Agnew says, that’s central to the way younger people are revisiting the Troubles, and interrogating the censorship and official political and media narratives. “That’s one of the most predominant ways in which we tackle everything now, even outside of the academic world. That has absolutely contributed to a way of looking at the North, and a renewed interest in the North.”
Living in London also contributed to the film-maker’s outlook. “Even if you look at the Kneecap film and its popularity, its American distribution – which so few Irish films actually get – and the fact that it’s our entry to the Oscars, that is a massive cultural shift in the centring of Northern Ireland and voices and experiences in the public imagination on either side of the Border.
“Why is that? Part of the reason I wanted to make this film was the way Brexit had made so prevalent the idea that the North has been made a forgotten place by the Irish and the British, particularly the knowledge gap, essentially, among most British people – that they didn’t understand the history, they didn’t understand the conflict, and therefore they were perplexed by what was happening in the Brexit negotiations, and how the North ended up being so important with the EU.”
And what of censorship in the Republic? The use of Section 31 of the Broadcasting Authority Act to ban Sinn Féin from Irish airwaves between 1971 and 1994 still looms large in the history of broadcast media here. In fact, Agnew says, “it was so draconian, so much more severe” that it helped the British government by effectively giving them “carte blanche to do whatever they wanted” when they introduced similar legislation. “They couldn’t have done it without the Irish State being not only unsympathetic but actually leading [the way].”
With The Ban, Agnew announces herself as a film-maker with a fascinating lens, unpicking both the comfort and the discomfort that underpin the stories we tell ourselves about Irish society.
The Ban will be screened at the Irish Film Institute in Dublin, as part of the IFI Documentary Festival, at 1.10pm on Sunday, September 29th, followed by a Q&A featuring Roisin Agnew, Stephen Rea and the former Sinn Féin publicity director Danny Morrison
