Irish Destiny

Irish Destiny An Irish film made just ten short years after the events it depicts, the believed lost and recently re-discovered and restored IRISH DESTINY charts a love story involving a middle-class IRA fighter against the background of the fight for independence. Upon its attempted release in the UK, the film was banned by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC).

IRISH DESTINY is a silent film with integrated accompaniment. Irish Destiny is the first fiction film that deals with the War of Independence and the first and only film written and produced by Isaac (Jack) Eppel, a Dublin GP and pharmacist who also enjoyed a career as theatre impresario and cinema owner. Many of those involved in Irish Destiny were also new to film making ¿ Paddy Dunne- Cullinan, secured the part of Denis O'Hara, the dashing male lead, due to his prowess as a horseman, not to any previous acting experience. Evelyn Henchey ran into the producers at a funfair in Bray and was cast there and then. After much persuasion her mother allowed the 16-year-old Evelyn to take the part of Kitty Shanahan on condition that Frances MacNamara acted as a chaperone, and that she would only be allowed to appear in scenes outdoors (because the interiors were shot in a London studio). Members of the Eppel family appear in the film as extras ¿ Eppel's son, Derek, is one of the children that file out of Moira Barry's schoolroom early in the film, while his brother Simon appears as the man smoking a cigar on the steps of Vaughan's Hotel (the factual and fictional headquarters of the IRA). In the shoot-outs with the Black and Tans, Eppel cast actual members of the IRA, while Kit O'Malley (himself the one-time Adjutant of the Dublin Brigade of the IRA) acted as military advisor to the production. However, the production retained a strong core of professionals. Most of the cast had previous acting careers ¿ Frances MacNamara had appeared with Brian Magowan in Willy Reilly and His Colleen Bawn (1920); Cathal McGarvey was an established stage comedian of the 1920s; while Carlow's Valentine Vousden was well known for his monologues, many of which were broadcast over Radio Éireann the national broadcaster. Eppel hired two professionals to direct and shoot the film. George Dewhurst had worked in both German and British film production. Besides directing, he had also scripted and appeared in a number of feature films. Joe Rosenthal was the son of the more famous Joe Rosenthal, whose footage of the Boer War played a key role in the evolution of the cinema newsreel. The film¿s dramatised sequences were shot in Dublin, Wicklow and at Shepherd's Bush Studios, London, in 1925. The earlier newsreel sequences had been filmed during the burning of Cork in December 1920 and Dublin¿s Customs House in May 1921. The film had its premier at the Corinthian Cinema on Easter Sunday 1926 - timed to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the Easter Rising. It was reviewed in glowing terms in the newspapers of the day ¿Irish Destiny contains the highest elements of art, action, scenery and photography. It is a triumph for Irish enterprise!¿ (Dublin Evening Mail 10/4/1926). Despite this favourable reception in Ireland and among Irish emigrant audiences abroad, the film was not a financial success. US and European audiences, more used to such polished big-budget productions as Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (made by Irish-emigrant Rex Ingram in 1921); The Thief of Bagdad (1924) and Ben Hur (1925), were less enthusiastic about Irish Destiny and its more modest production values. In Britain, the film's political content earned it a banning order from the British Board of Film Censors, until it was resubmitted as the less inflammatory ¿An Irish Mother¿ in 1928. The debt incurred by the poor reception of the film took years to clear. Eppel left Ireland, never to make another film and resumed general medical practice in England until he died in Kingston-on- Thames in 1942. The film was not publicly screened in Ireland for almost seventy years when, to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of 1916, the Irish Film Institute screened a print of the film at an early stage of restoration in ¿Reviewing the Revolution¿. In 1993 the restored film was screened in the National Concert Hall with full orchestral performance of Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin¿s score to public and critical acclaim. 2006 saw a reprise of the live orchestral presentation of Irish Destiny in the National Concert Hall. To coincide with the 2006 screening the IFI produced a limited run of the film on DVD.

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