by Josephine Craven
When Liam O’Neill speaks of his father, he does not speak of a man, but of a presence. “When a young man loses his father at fourteen,” he says, “his father remains a spirit, fixed in that light.”
O’Neill was still a boy when his father died in West Kerry, at a moment when Ireland itself was on the cusp of profound change. As the film Ryan’s Daughter brought an influx of money and modernity to the Dingle Peninsula, the old ways of life – manual, local, inherited – were quietly slipping away.
O’Neill remembers sitting in a cinema in Dingle watching the spectacle unfold on the screen, while at home his father lay beneath a cold white sheet. The contrast, he recalls, was stark: warmth and colour in one world, stillness and finality in the other. That sense of rupture – between generations, between ways of life – has never left his work.
