Neil Jordan: De Valera is a fascinating figure. We lived in a country that emanated from the brain of one paranoid individual

I’m never entirely satisfied with telling a realistic story. I have to force it into areas of fantasy. I would justify that by saying that most of us don’t fully understand ourselves and the world is not entirely real. Growing up in Ireland you were living in a fantastical universe that didn’t make any logical sense. I was an altar boy and had to say, “Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem” (I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and Earth). If you translate those phrases, they are nothing to do with a world that any human being would experience.
I remember this severe version of good and evil. Do you remember Corpus Christi? The entire of Clontarf suburb would close down and there would be loudspeakers placed on every lamp-post, with cables going from one to the other, and it would relay Mass and you’d hear these droning voices talking about sublunary things as you were listening to The Beatles or Bob Dylan. The entire country was devoted to these strange events.
Pat McCabe’s novel The Butcher Boy was a book that spoke about the weird combination of fantasy and grungy realism in Irish life. This boy was growing up in the town and the Virgin Mary was as real to him as his dying mother … At the same time the entire town is waiting for the appearance of the Virgin Mary and they’re walking around saying rosaries. I made the Butcher Boy movie, in a way, to show that strange disparity between what’s logical and what’s fantastical.
The only avenues for creativity in the country came out of writing. In a way, the only sanity seemed to come out of writing. It was the only window on a wider world.
I grew up in a transitionary Ireland. Jim Sheridan and I wrote a play together called Journal of a Hole. It was a really bad pun on the autobiography of Pope John XXIII which was called Journal of a Soul. There was a friend of ours who had grown up in Artane (industrial school). We talked to him about the oppression and brutality he experienced and we wrote this play. It caused quite a fuss: it was regarded as a disgraceful assault on the church and the Christian Brothers.
I was offered scripts that were about the same thing about 30 years later. And I did wonder: why were those things not written about more then? That kind of retrospective outrage always assumes that you yourself would have acted differently. It’s great to imagine we all would have been better but I lived through it and I saw a lot of people who just adhered to the norm.
I went to America in 1969 with a theatre group. I went to Europe and I experienced the youthful transformation that happened in other cultures. In Ireland I think that potential for change was blighted by the emergence of this ancient conflict on the streets of Belfast and Derry. The impulse towards rebellion was channelled into something that was ancient and weird and f**ked up. In the 70s and 80s, if anybody wanted to question the society that we’d grown up in, all those questions were superseded by what they’d call “the national question”.
[ Neil Jordan: ‘We all need disguises. Part of being alive is pretending to be something you’re not’Opens in new window ]
[ Amnesiac: A Memoir by Neil Jordan – zippy, valuable and suitably oddOpens in new window ]
I’ve made three movies about the position of political violence in Ireland – Angel, The Crying Game and Michael Collins – and I made a movie based on a book of Pat McCabe’s called Breakfast on Pluto, which dealt with it in a tangential way. How can you have a contemporary polity that seems to be part of Europe but that’s being ravaged by these ancient arguments where car bombs and political murder is a fact? Those movies are my response to living in that Ireland.
De Valera is a fascinating figure. He did the most enlightened things and the most appalling things. It’s not in the final cut but [in Michael Collins] I had him in a state of nervous breakdown walking through the back roads of Ireland. And I think he did have some kind of collapse. But that’s just me. I’ve got into enough trouble over that [laughter]. We lived in a country that emanated from the brain of one paranoid individual.
Ireland is a much better place than it was. I think [de Valera’s Ireland] is gone. We live with a different set of mental realities now. If you read Sally Rooney you’re not in that world at all. That’s the wonderful thing about her. She’s writing about rather privileged Trinity students, talking about gender issues and Marxism. I think her books are absolutely wonderful and they are about the way people live their lives now and there’s not a hint of de Valera’s nonsense to be seen there.
In conversation with Patrick Freyne. This interview was edited for length and clarity. Neil Jordan’s memoir Amnesiac is out now.