Rocky Road to Dublin

Rocky Road to Dublin is a 1967 documentary film by Irish-born journalist Peter Lennon and French cinematographer Raoul Coutard, examining the contemporary state of the Republic of Ireland, posing the question, "what do you do with your revolution once you've got it?" It argues that Ireland was dominated by cultural isolationism, Gaelic and clerical traditionalism at the time of its making. A brief sketch of Irish history since the Easter Rising of 1916 is drawn, in which the hopes of the revolutionary founders of the Irish Free State for a republican society are dashed. The writer Seán Ó Faoláin argues that what emerged was a society of "urbanized peasants" without moral courage who observed a self-interested silence in a "constant...