Candid kids with cameras let us into their worlds

A new RTÉ series gives children from four Irish communities the chance to show us how they see the world – the resulting footage displays a compelling honesty

‘I DIDN’T KNOW I lived on an island.” A girl is speaking to camera, totally relaxed. “I thought it was just another place, like Letterkenny or the mainland. I thought an island would be a place with sandy beaches and coconuts and palm trees and stuff like that. This is the opposite.”

Niamh lives on Tory, population 140. Together with three other girls – Ciara, Lauren and Ríonnach – they are the Tory Film Club. They spent a little over a year of their lives filming their world for On the Block, a four-part television series to be broadcast on RTÉ2 over Christmas week.

On the Blockis a record of 21st-century kids, one that's virtually free of adult agendas, or the self-censorship you often get when adults interview kids. A remote island in the northwest isn't a world away from inner-city Dublin because it is true everywhere that you can find out what kids think, or you can have them sit up straight. You can't have both.

An earlier incarnation of On the Block came out of a film club in Dublin’s Fatima Mansions, where supervising director (and associate producer on this series) Katie Lincoln took kids out filming, but gave them total control. “[Kids] know if they’re being given fake responsibility or real responsibility,” she says.

Broadcast-quality cameras have become light enough for kids to handle themselves. “You’re as close as you can get to a kid’s perspective on the world.” Once kids hold the camera, it’s surprising how few grown-ups there are. “If an adult appears, it’s a low angle shot up their nose.” In all the clubs, when the camera ceased to be a new toy, and when the adults stepped away, the footage displayed a compelling honesty. In Fatima, the fruitfulness of their boredom was entertaining enough to be edited into a programme and shown on RTÉ2 in 2006.

For this series, producer Cúán Mac Conghail of Dublin-based production company Macalla Teoranta chose four communities that would together represent a broad range of experiences: Adamstown in Dublin, Dromahane in Cork, Buckingham Street in Dublin’s inner city, and Tory.

The kids were all aged between eight and 12 at the time of shooting, which started around late 2007 and finished earlier this year. “They’re old enough to articulate themselves, but young enough to tell you what’s really important,” says Mac Conghail, whose main editorial challenge was actually to avoid editorialising. “You have to do it in a way that represents what was a priority to them.” A vital element is that the film equipment is left behind for the communities to keep – the programme is only the broadcast element of what could be a long-term project.

There's an awareness of capturing their way of life. In Dromahane, it's one where the century-old local sweet shop, run by 87-year old Bridgie, is just as relevant as The X Factor.The Tory kids introduce us to Patsy Dan, the King of Tory, who explains to an amused Niamh that while he's recently been given a car, "I don't think anyone can say that the king is good at driving yet". They also invite us into their clubhouse, an old henhouse, where they've put up curtains.

For the Belvedere Film Club in inner-city Dublin, the sloping ground floor of Connolly Station and the ramps in the IFSC provide good inclines for roller skating. Talbot Street is their favourite, “because it’s nice and smooth, and we get a laugh out of it”. On Halloween, Aoife, the oldest in the group, lists the quantity of each material in the local bonfire, tells us that some kids stay up all night guarding it from rival groups. They’ll be at the fire later, but for now the girls show its complex organisation from a safe distance.

“We’re in the lane,” Carly says, “because the lads are all messing and they’ll throw bangers, and they’ll come over and mess with the camera.” To kids, the suburban work-in-progress of Adamstown is not a success or failure. It’s where they play and live, where piles of gravel become dirt-bike jumps. The kids squeal as they ride an otherwise empty bus, “whoooaaa” and “wheeeee” around every corner, like it’s a fairground attraction.

Saidu, Faizan and Lar explain to camera that being a bus driver seems too good to be true: “They pay you to drive their car!” While the camera helped kids explore places they might not otherwise have explored, the footage itself brings responsibility.

“The access they’re giving you is unique, and you can’t exploit that.” Mac Conghail says.

It’s not a polemic, and it’s not an experiment. It’s just a document of kids being themselves.

“I don’t care what adults think of it,” says Mac Conghail. “If kids watch it, that’s it. It was made by them and for them, and hopefully we haven’t got too much in the way.”