Free Days of Heaven by Declan Lynch

was universally regarded as an all-Irish international success, and of course director Jim Sheridan and producer Noel Pearson are Irish to all intents and purposes,
yet one of the Oscars was won by Daniel Day-Lewis, who is in many ways, deeply English. Due to his complex bohemian background, he is also deeply Irish in many ways, but again, there’s a
mixture here. Would a conventionally Irish actor, born and reared in this country, have delivered such an extraordinary performance? Maybe he would have done. We will never know.
    But Neil Jordan surely, is Irish in every way? Yes, but much of his most successful work has been done in collaboration with the producer Stephen Woolley, who is English. They would appear to
understand each other at a creative level. And Jordan would also acknowledge a debt to his mentor in film-making, John Boorman, who has lived in Ireland for many years but who is definitely
English.
    It is an interdependence and a source of mutual inspiration that was perhaps most powerfully seen in the relationship between Brian Keenan and John McCarthy, the Irishman and the Englishman who
were in captivity in Beirut at this time. They would be released in 1990 and 1991 respectively, having completely missed Euro 88 and Italia 90 and their friendship would be viewed as a rare example
of the Irish and the English coming together in a common cause.
    But as we are seeing, it is not so rare after all.
    We have already alluded to this potent fusion in the area of rock ’n’ roll, whereby the children of Irish emigrants would be regarded as Paddies by the English and as Brits by their
relations back in Ireland, in Roscommon and Cork and Mayo where they would go for their summer holidays. They were mixed-race in a way that seemed to lead to enormous creativity. Enormous pain, no
doubt, in many ways, too, but pain that produced Johnny Rotten and Morrissey and the Gallaghers and Shane MacGowan.
    The Pogues were actually derided early doors by the traditional musician Noel Hill, for what they were doing to Irish music. But while the purists felt they were bringing us into disrepute with
their noise and their drinking, the rest of the world could see that a beautiful thing was happening here with this London-Irish combo. They had created this sound of the Irish in England which you
felt had somehow always existed, just waiting to be released — but not by the Irish acting alone. In this context the narrow nationalism of Sinn Féin, ‘ourselves alone’,
can be seen to have brought us not just a thousand pointless murders, but was Paddy’s sure-fire recipe for failure.
    Roddy Doyle may have fulfilled all the criteria for full-blown Irishness, but his commercial success was assisted by the brilliance of Alan Parker’s version of The Commitments ,
which was made with American money and which turned Roddy’s slim debut novel into a barnstorming modern musical — that would be the same Alan Parker, who was so disappointed to hear us
cheering the misfortunes of his England team as he scouted for locations in Dublin pubs. And then there were the film versions of The Snapper and The Van, superbly directed by Stephen
Frears, an Englishman, of course. Roddy, indeed, would be an obvious collaborator with the English, because English football is his game, and the game of his male characters. They speak of doing
things ‘the Liverpool way’, as naturally as their Gaelic literary forbears spoke of getting the pikes together at the rising of the moon.
    I am thinking also of Arthur Mathews, Graham Linehan, Dermot Morgan, Ardal O’Hanlon and Pauline McLynn who were all football men and women — all, at least, apart from Graham. Whilst
they could put together one of the most successful comedy series of all time, featuring situations and characters who were quintessentially Irish, again they could only do it with the generous
support of the English, such as the late Geoffrey Perkins, a producer who believed in