Themes in Irish movies. Part 1: Republicanism

There has been some criticisms that Irish films often carry a very limited amount of themes. In Frank Stapleton's The Fifth Province, a satire on filmmaking, he urges 'No more stories about Irish mothers, preists, sexual repressions and the miseries of rural life.'
Although it is unfair to limit the meanings of all Irish movies to a few themes, I will look at themes in Irish cinema in general, which may help to understand the issues that most irish films are concerned with.
The notion of nationalism, and in particular Ireland's quest for a united Republic, is well documented in Irish movies. From the earliest films in Ireland, such as Irish Destiny, to our biggest movie successes, such as Michael Collins, and even in some of Ireland's more experimental productions, such as 2008's Hunger, notions of nationalism are faced.
Irish films often portray these political points through personal stories. These stories often have a backdrop of Irish nationalism.
As Martin Loone notes in his book Irish Film: The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema, Irish cinema commonly features a "kind of national questioning that we have identified as an aspect of recent Irish cinema, revisiting a particularily acrimonious and unpleasant episode in the recent history of Ireland to draw lessons for the present."
Examples of Irish films that contain a personal story with a political backdrop are; Some Mothers Son, where the story of the H-Block hunger strike is told from the point of view of one of the mothers of a H-Block prisoner. Another example is The Wind that Shakes the Barley, this shows the experiences of two brothers as they are turned against each other in the Irish Civil War. in this sense we get the true atrocities of the Irish Civil War through a personal story of two brothers.

I will be looking at some other common themes in Irish movies in later posts.