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'There was no one around': Cian O'Connor on his lockdown images of Dingle

Five years on from the first COVID lockdown, of March 2020, many look back on the pandemic years with a certain nostalgia. They remember the Great Pause, the first time in their adult lives they had the chance to step off the treadmill and reassess their values and priorities. For Cian O'Connor, it was something else entirely. Having recently completed his degree at the National Film School in Dun Laoghaire, he had moved home to Dingle, Co Kerry while he tried to figure out what to do next. 'I had terrible job prospects, and most of my relationships and friendships had broken down,' he says. 'I had existential malaise. I was like, I've got to move to New York. I'll start a new life and become a new person. I was getting all geared up for that. I'd bought my visa, I was about to buy my plane ticket, I was just going to get the hell out of Ireland. 'And then the pandemic happened. And there I was, stuck at home with my parents. You can't imagine how upset I was.' As the days and weeks crawled by, O'Connor realised he had to find something to occupy his mind. 'I had an old film camera, and I decided to take photos of the town and its people,' he says. 'Tourism is the lifeblood of Dingle, and we had a heatwave for two months. It was beautiful, the perfect tourist weather. But there was no one around. The streets were empty, and all the businesses were closed, with signs outside saying, sorry, hopefully things will change. I just couldn't get over it. It was too interesting not to document.' O'Connor arranged to interview many of those he photographed around the town. 'We did the interviews by Zoom, which was really new back then. Everything was so uncertain for people, they told me loads. Stuff they wouldn't normally talk about at all. A lot of people looked forward to getting back to work. Jimmy Flannery, who ran the boat tours to see Fungie the Dolphin, said something like, 'I still go out and see Fungie, just to check in on him.' "But then, on the other side, some people found that the lack of tourism was maybe a good thing. It was a reason for us to reflect on how Dingle is going because, with tourism being the biggest industry, a lot of other things have fallen by the wayside.' Cian O'Connor, photographer. One of those interviewed was Finn Mac Donnell, the fourth generation of his family to work at Dick Mack's Brewhouse bar. 'Finn felt that the town is too expensive now. Young people can't live there anymore. And that was back in 2020, before the cost of living crisis.' Another interviewee was Philip King, producer of the Other Voices television music series that has become synonymous with Dingle. 'Philip brought up this analogy of the hare's corner, a part of a field that wasn't ploughed, so the hare would have a place to live. He compares that to Dingle. You need an arts and culture centre in the town, he says. You can't just be maximising every square foot of land for profit. A lot of people feel that way, to be honest.' O'Connor finally got out in November 2021. He'd befriended a music producer and record company executive named Steve Ralbovsky, who has a holiday home in Dingle. 'Steve's a music guy,' he says. 'He signed the Strokes and Kings of Leon. He helped me get an internship with a script consultancy in New York, a company run by John Coles, who directed House of Cards and Sex and the City.' O'Connor now works full time with the company, Talking Wall Pictures. 'I make short films as well,' he says. 'The last one is called An Chathair Mór/Big City. It's a low-budget film, which we funded ourselves. I flew over my two best mates from Ireland to act in it. It was post-COVID, so we got cheap airline tickets, a €300 round trip. They stayed at my apartment, and we shot it in Woodlawn up in the Bronx.' An Chathair Mór/Big City tells of a young man who arrives in New York and forms a connection with a distant relative, an older woman who shares her love of the Irish language. It is, says O'Connor, the first film in the Irish language shot in New York. 'We got good press here on account of that,' he says. The film premiered at Galway Film Festival, and has since been screened at the Newport Beach Film Festival. 'And it's screening this month at the Fastnet Film Festival in West Cork.' It was O'Connor's mother who encouraged him to revisit the material he'd shot in Dingle during COVID. 'One of the first people I photographed was Kathleen O'Sullivan at the Phoenix Cinema. I remember she was very nervous, but the photo came out really nice. There's a Facebook group called Dingle Photos Past and Present. I stuck the photo up there and said I'd see how it goes. People loved it. Even the first day, it got hundreds of likes.' Another image from Cian O'Connor's exhibition, entitled 'Dingle 2020: The Year the Tourists Never Came'. The response encouraged O'Connor to approach Féile na Bealtaine with a proposal to showcase his work. The result is Dingle 2020: The Year the Tourists Never Came, an exhibition of twelve B&W images, along with a selection of audio recordings, at An Díseart. 'It's five years on from that first lockdown,' he says. 'Which is really not that long, but it does feel like a long time ago, so much has happened since. The people in the photographs have never had a chance to see them before. The same with the interviews; no one has heard them. The main thing for me is, I just want to give this exhibition back to the town. I hope it'll make people think about the resilience we had during COVID. Everybody was freaking out about the lack of tourists, but I'd never seen the town so bound together. I don't think I would have been able to take these photos if the community wasn't so strong.' O'Connor is busy making plans for his next short film, about a woman who's forced to move back to her hometown after she loses her job. O'Connor himself has no plans to return to Ireland just yet. 'Here in New York, there's a lot a talk of a recession,' he says. 'But I have a job, for now at least. And to be honest, I'm paying the same rent here as I'd be paying in Dublin.' Cian O'Connor's Dingle 2020: The Year the Tourists Never Came exhibition is showing at An Díseart, Dingle as part of Féile na Bealtaine, until Thursday, May 8. Further information: Read More John Patrick McHugh: 10 of the books that have influenced me through the years