On Film Location in Ireland
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Green on the Screen: Touring Hollywood’s Film Locations across Ireland
 Ferocious Mel Gibson, bedecked in a bit of tartan kilt and with his face painted blue, led the charge across the Curragh Racecourse into ancient battle. The movie was Braveheart, and most of it was filmed on location in Ireland on the plains of Kildare and in the scenic hills and valleys of County Wicklow. There are driving tours and a map that guide you round the sites of three major films made in Wicklow (Braveheart, Excalibur and Michael Collins) For the recent futuristic movie Reign of Fire, a mock medieval fortress popped up overnight at the site of an old lead mine at Wicklow Gap. The real Hollywood is not far away in the west of Wicklow (the Hollywood of California was named after this small rural town). Some scenes from Dancing at Lughnasa, starring Meryl Streep, were shot in the town. Wicklow’s towns have also made frequent appearances on film. Bray was used for scenes in My Left Foot, Michael Collins and The Commitments. A house on the main street in Greystones featured in Angela’s Ashes.
Other regions of Ireland have been just as fertile as film locales. In 1956, Youghal in County Cork was the setting for John Huston’s film adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, starring Gregory Peck. The opening sequences of Saving Private Ryan, staged in County Wexford, are perhaps the most famous scenes filmed in Ireland. The Quiet Man, directed by John Ford in the 1950s, depicted a rather idyllic and stereotypic view of rural Ireland, but the film was very much a classic of its genre. John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara were the leading actors, and it was filmed in Cong in County Mayo on the west coast.
Bull McCabe in The Field, played by Richard Harris, may be the most extreme caricature of the rural Irish farmer. The unique landscape around Leenane, County Galway, at the mouth of Killary Harbour (Ireland’s only fjord), is where Jim Sheridan’s film was located. The Dingle Peninsula in the southwest was the setting for two romantic epics from different eras. David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter was filmed near Dunquin in the 1970s. Two decades later, Ron Howard’s film Far and Away, starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, was made in a landscape that hadn’t changed much since then.
Dublin features in many films, but the most acclaimed was My Left Foot by the leading Irish director Jim Sheridan. In Belfast, the incredibly ornate Crown Liquor Saloon (a former Victorian gin palace) was at the center of the action of Carol Reed’s 1947 suspense drama Odd Man Out starring James Mason. Divorcing Jack was also filmed in the city in the late 1990s. Jim Sheridan’s film trilogy about the troubles in Northern Ireland (In the Name of the Father, Some Mother’s Son and The Boxer) was shot partly in Belfast. The opening scenes of Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game were filmed in South Armagh.
Irish fiction has translated to film with great success. Maeve Binchy’s best-seller Circle of Friends was filmed in picturesque Inistige in County Kilkenny. More recently, Cecelia Ahern’s best-selling P.S I Love You was shot partly in Wicklow. A true classic filmed in Dublin is undoubtedly John Huston’s last film, The Dead. The setting, an old Georgian house on the Liffey just beside the appropriately named James Joyce Bridge, has recently been renovated as a tourist attraction.
In recent times, there has been a vibrant homegrown film industry both north and south, and you might come across a film crew anywhere as you travel about the country. This is manifest in the growing international reputation of the many annual film festivals held in major Irish cities.
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