Gerard Mannix Flynn is a powerful and passionate speaker. His words are precise, sharpened by compassion, and his tone is cutting, inflamed by indignation. Writing for the film section of a student publication rarely leads to discussions of issues as fraught as those explored in the powerful new documentary Land Without God, which Mannix co-directed.
During the interview I feel slightly nervous, and when I ask Mannix whether it was difficult to get his family members to speak on camera about such painful experiences, I refer to them as “victims”. Mannix corrects me: “First of all they’re not victims in that sense, and they’re not survivors. They’re people who have experienced horrendous, trespassing crimes against them. When you start using terminology like victims all of a sudden, you’re closed down.”
The importance of speech crops up throughout our discussion – not only of the words we use but also who gets to say them. Mannix sees Land Without God as an important contribution to the historical narrative surrounding Ireland’s reformatory and industry schools which, with the help of the church and the state, became the sites of sustained and systematic physical, sexual and mental abuse. Mannix intends for Land Without God to add the previously omitted “witness voice” to the historical record.
The film is primarily comprised of a series of interviews with different generations of Mannix’s family as they recollect the ways in which they were, and still are, affected by these institutions. Mannix describes the film as a “provocative work of art whose main ingredient is the honest truth told by the witnesses”.
I think there’s a major ethical issue in Trinity College in the manner in which they treat the local people in and around Pearse St
He feels that previous “films like Philomena, Deliver Us from Evil, States of Fear, were all about exposing the scandal” while in “the Ryan Report, and certainly on national television, the witnesses were treated as commodities”. Until now, Mannix suggests, “we had plenty of representations of the issue but no presentations”.
Returning to the question that began this piece – whether it was hard to persuade his family to appear on camera – Mannix admits that filming was, at times, “extraordinarily difficult and uncomfortable for everyone” but insists that “the end result was progress for my family who stand over what they say and are proud of what they say”.
Mannix hopes that the film will give “some measure of solace and some measure of confidence” to those who may be too afraid to speak about their own similar experiences, or to those who “are living in a world where they are suffering by what they’re holding onto”.
In Land Without God, it was important for Mannix that working-class people were given their own platform. The children who were sent to Ireland’s industrial schools mainly came from “within a small radius of the city of Dublin” and were “all from the same social-economic background”. The issues that Land Without God explores are “interlocked”, in Mannix’s eyes, with modern-day issues relating to “gangland violence, drug taking, dysfunction, alcoholism and homelessness”. He says that though industrial schools are defunct, the “real issues have not been dealt with”.
In the film itself, when people begin to talk, they have revelations as they never thought about things like that
Mannix grew up in a block of flats on Mercer St, and his work as a Dublin City Councillor is often concerned with working-class issues. He feels that working-class people are constantly being “misrepresented” by both sides of the political spectrum and that in the majority of social programmes, working-class people are “told to step aside and these people are going to liberate us. We’re not the ones who are allowed to have the means of our own success and our own production”.
Mannix’s belief – that many social programmes don’t sufficiently empower working-class people – draws Trinity into his firing line. “Personally speaking,” he says, “I think there’s a major ethical issue in Trinity College in the manner in which they treat the local people in and around Pearse St”. Despite Mercer Street being “10 minutes” from the likes of Trinity and Grafton St, their worlds are “vastly different”. Mannix points towards Trinity’s architecture as being emblematic of its disconnect from the world surrounding it: Westland Row is “a walk over for the students, they don’t even touch the ground” and “the building beside the train station is basically sealed off”. Rather than outreach programmes, Mannix insists that working-class people want “an inclusion, equity and equality as a people, as a class in our society and not to be deemed other”.
“Even the people who come out of Trinity”, he says, “who have done a degree from working classes, carry this rather peculiar stigma, carry this rather crazy, alien language of how they describe stuff”.
He’s particularly critical of Senator Lynne Ruane, but Mannix extends his criticism to left-wing political discourse more generally. He argues that the “Richard Boyd Barretts, the Joan Collinses, the Bríd Smiths, the Sinn Féiners and the independents” of this world “need to get a different sort of articulation and a different sort of language”.
The strength of Land Without God, Mannix feels, is that it is “an articulate piece of work”. He insists that “that articulation comes from the people who participate, it doesn’t come from me”. Mannix would like Land Without God to be “seen by my class” and by the public at large because it “is something that people have a duty to see and understand”. He hopes the film will help spark a new dialogue about church and state abuses and about working-class issues more generally. He identifies a radical potential in the act of talking: “Like in the film itself, when people begin to talk, they have revelations as they never thought about things like that.”
Land Without God can be seen this week in either the Lighthouse or the Irish Film Institute in Dublin, or in Galway in the Eye Cinema. The film will open on November 1st in Limerick in the Odeon Cinema and will be screened in Derry in late November as part of the Foyle Film Festival.
