Date Published: 07-Apr-2011

In Tuam, a young man wakes up with an awful hangover. As he begins to piece together some of the events from the night before, he realises that he now owes a lot of money to the town’s most notorious criminal and he has 48 hours to pay. His beautiful girlfriend is pregnant. He feels cornered.

Down in Limerick, an unemployed father of ten surveys his beloved housing estate as it’s about to be knocked to the ground. He sees Government attempts to regenerate the area as a threat to his freedom, a treasured way of life in which he roams the estate on a pieballed horse. There are no jobs in Moyhill, but humour gets people through the day.

Up in North Mayo, a small rural community feels under attack. A giant multinational and the Irish State are threatening the peace and tranquillity people have taken for granted for generations, as opposition to a gas pipeline tears the community apart. People have gone to jail, they feel they have been betrayed by their own Government.

Three stories, two of them fictional and one very real. The first two relate to short dramas which are currently taking the country by storm thanks to RTE’s StoryLand competition, while the third is the subject of a feature length documentary which has won over audiences and critics as far away as Boston and Berlin.

And the common thread between gritty drama Lucky Run, mockumentary The Outlaw Concy Ryan, and Irish Film and Television Award winner The Pipe is that all three were filmed by small, independent companies which have sprung up in Galway in the past couple of years.

The country might be in the grips of an economic crisis, but right now there is a thriving underground film industry in Galway. The county boasts anything up to 30 independent production companies, a host of freelance technicians, actors, and producers, its very own soap opera in Ros na Rún, and an innovative broadcaster in TG4.

A ‘cottage’ industry is thriving here, boosted by the presence of the Huston School of Film and Digital Media, commissioning editors at TG4, the Irish Film Board (IFB) and the Galway Film Resource Centre. Without funding from TG4 and the IFB, for example, The Pipe might never have seen the light of day.

Film-maker Richie Ó Domhnaill was living with his uncle on Broadhaven Bay when he began to take an interest in all the trouble surrounding the Corrib Gas pipeline nearby. He filmed the controversy as a cameraman for TG4 news but, convinced that the true story was not being told, he set up his own company in order to film The Pipe. After four years of filming, the result is a gripping documentary which has won over audiences on both sides of the Atlantic.

“I made the film because I felt that it was a very difficult story for the media to portray and that the full story was not appearing in the national media. The most important elements of it seemed to be way off the radar. As an independent film-maker, though, the financial side of things is tough,” admits Ó Domhnaill, whose company lost €110,000 last year.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.