Fighting destiny

A romantic film set during the War of Independence, first shown in Dublin in the 1920s and featuring fascinating historical footage, came close to being lost forever after failing to gain its deserved success first time round. Almost a century later, it's back in the public domain. By Ruth HegartyIn the early years of the fledgling Irish state, a young doctor by the name of Jack Eppel set out to make a crowd-pleasing film, the first to depict the events of the War of Independence a few short years earlier. Unlike Seán O'Casey's Plough and the Stars, which famously opened to riots, this was a romantic love story which was to make heroes of the men and women who fought for Ireland's freedom. Irish Destiny opened to packed houses in Dublin despite brilliant sunshine on the Easter weekend in 1926, the tenth anniversary of the Rising.
Film was unveiled to a mass audience for the first time in 1896, and had caught on so rapidly that, by the 1920s, the Irish Times would comment, “every Irish village has a picture-house today”. In Britain, 30 million people were going to the cinema every week. In the Dublin Evening Mail, Dr HP Newsholme was worried that the effect of film would “produce an hypnotic state among picturegoers”, and recommended that only films expressing “British sentiments” be shown.
The IRA was also quick to respond to this “hypnotic” power of film, and bombed the Masterpiece Cinema in Dublin and seized exciting British propagandist films like The Prince of Wales' Tour. Around the same time, the cast of Seán O'Casey's play The Plough and the Stars were being intimidated. Between the matinee and the evening show at the Abbey, they had to stay inside the theatre, to ensure they weren't kidnapped to prevent the show going up. The political power players wanted dominion over the theatres and picture houses.
Irish Destiny tells the fictional story of how young Dennis O'Hara was inspired to join the IRA after a nasty raid by the Black and Tans on his home village of Clonmore (which careful viewers will recognise as Enniskerry in Co Wicklow, almost unchanged). He risks his life to bring a message to the IRA headquarters up in the capital, but is betrayed by an evil informer, who also runs a poitín still. O'Hara is shot and interned by the British. His true love, waiting for him at home, believes him dead, and his mother loses her sight from the worry of it all.
The film uses footage from newsreels to give it an edge and veracity. Footage of the burning of Cork in 1920 and the burning of the Customs House in Dublin in 1921 are intercut with scenes dramatising the IRA's mission to rise up against the evil Black and Tans. There's a wonderful scene which traces the hero's path on a purloined motorbike from St Stephen's Green, down Grafton Street, around by Trinity and up O'Connell Street onto Parnell Square to the headquarters of the IRA in Vaughan's Hotel. The streets are packed with people in suits and hats, and double-decker trams throng O'Connell St.
Eventually, when the Anglo-Irish Truce is called, there is dancing at the crossroads in Clonmore in kilts with bagpipes, and Denis O'Hara makes his way home to surprise an ecstatic mother and rescue his fiancee from the evil poitín maker, burning down the poitín still in the process. The final scene, in the family home with the still-blind mother, concludes with a shot of O'Hara's father grasping the hand of the parish priest, and then it cuts to a triumphant tricolour and ‘The End'.
Irish Destiny opened at the Palace cinema on Pearse Street and the Corinthian in Dublin. It did well there, but not beyond. Eppel believed that there was a ready market for Irish films abroad, as did many who went to a special meeting on the future of Irish film held in the restaurant of Clery's after the film opened. Irish Destiny was thought to be important for building tourist traffic, but Eppel failed to capitalise on this. One review in the US thought it “doubtful whether its appeal will interest others than those from the ould sod”.
The British censor banned the film, and the producers responded by cutting 20 minutes out of it, renaming it An Irish Mother, and securing a release in 1926. That version of the film has been lost. Irish Destiny itself was lost for over 50 years. Evelyn Henchey who played a young girl Kit in the film when she was 16, wrote to the Irish Times in the 1980s wondering what had become of the only film she ever acted in, and an advertisement for it found under the lino in a Rathmines bedsit started a search which resulted in two copies being found, one in Washington and another in Australia.
Irish Destiny was to be Jack Eppel's last film, as well as his first: it bankrupted him and may well have broken up his marriage. He took over the Palace Cinema and gave up the day job as a doctor. He had first hired a famous Abbey actor, Sara Allgood, to play the role of Denis O'Hara's mother, but eventually cast someone else. Sara Allgood said she had passed up a part in a Bernard Shaw play because of being contracted to the film, and sued him. Eppel lost, and Allgood won damages against him of £37; the judge said he regretted he couldn't award Allgood more. Eppel went to England afterwards, leaving a raft of debts behind which his brother, a draper who had to become a cinema proprietor, eventually paid off.
Irish Destiny has just been released on high definition DVD by the Irish Film Archive. A screening of the film, accompanied by a score by Micheál O Suilleabháin, was shown at the National Concert Hall on 16 March as part of Tradfest.