4 days ago
Pray For Our Sinners: Sinead O'Shea's tale from the resistance
The most-watched documentary at Irish cinemas in 2023, Pray for Our Sinners documents filmmaker Sinéad O'Shea's return to her hometown, Navan, to explore the impact of the Catholic Church on the community in decades past - watch it now via RTÉ Player.
As Pray For Our Sinners makes its RTÉ debut, Sinéad O'Shea revisits her film and explores how she 'wanted to show how Ireland had worked as I was growing up'.
For some Irish people there has been enough said already about the activities of the Catholic Church.
I understand. I grew up in the countryside outside Navan, then a small town in the midlands, in the 1980s and 1990s.
By the time I was in secondary school, the scandals involving the Catholic Church had begun to emerge, and later I worked on some of them for The Guardian, BBC Newsnight, The New York Times and Al Jazeera English.
It was this familiarity which inspired me to make Pray for Our Sinners. An old schoolfriend, Sinéad Burke, had told me about some of the work undertaken by a husband and wife doctor team in Navan.
I knew this could be a different film.
Watch the trailer for Pray For Our Sinners
Over decades, I would later discover, Dr. Paddy and Dr. Mary Randles had fought against corporal punishment, rescued young women from mother and baby homes and opened a family planning clinic. Along the way they faced opposition from within the town, led by a beloved local priest, Fr. Farrell.
A story of resistance from Ireland in this era is novel in itself but there was more to it than that. I wanted to show how Ireland had worked as I was growing up; how the informal hierarchies operated, how the threat of marginalisation was so frightening for us all.
We began development filming in lockdown. Dr. Paddy had passed away in 2017 and I had spent time chatting with Dr. Mary about her husband's work. The release of the mother and baby home report in 2021 prompted her to discuss her own memories too and we decided to find some of the people she had helped. This became our film.
From a logistical point of view, production was difficult but our participants; Dr. Mary, Betty, Edna and Norman were exceptional.
I wanted to honour the quietness and modesty of life then. As I say in the film, it was considered American to complain when I was growing up, and to be honest, I'm still a bit conflicted about this.
At its best, Catholicism suggests there are bigger forces at work than one's own concerns and there is sanctuary, I think, in this belief.
A story of resistance from Ireland in this era is novel in itself but there was more to it than that.
In practice of course, it often meant that vulnerable voices were overwhelmed by the fears and desires of more powerful individuals but times were not always all bad.
It felt important to achieve a balance, to ensure the film didn't feel anti-Catholic and to acknowledge the sense of community provided by the Church.
my friend @SineadEOShea has made a film, 'pray for our sinners', about some people in her home town of navan who stood up against the social control of the catholic church at a time when most of us still felt it prudent to keep our heads down.
— Ken Early (@kenearlys) May 7, 2023
Many of the real harms caused by Catholicism were also facilitated by the State and I wanted to emphasise that some big questions are still unanswered. At Sean Ross mother and baby home, for instance, 1090 babies died but nearly all their remains are "missing."
It was important to me that people in Navan did not feel undermined. Urban middle classes tend to condescend to those from rural or religious backgrounds. There was great nuance and humour in small town life as I was growing up and I wanted to celebrate that.
We finally finished the edit in May 2022 and I sent it off to the Toronto Film Festival. It had already been rejected as a rough cut from other much less high profile festivals so I was astonished when it was selected.
Our world premiere was held in September, three weeks after I gave birth. We then embarked on a tour of US festivals after that, winning Best Documentary at the Hamptons International Film Festival and were nominated for awards in Chicago and Washington DC.
The big test though, would be our screenings at home. We had our Irish premiere in the Dublin Film Festival with Dr. Mary, Ethna, Norman and Betty in attendance.
I think everyone there will remember it. The cinema was so crowded that some sat on the floor. There was weeping but also laughter. At one point, as Mary gave vent to her feelings onscreen, the audience burst into spontaneous applause. Afterwards there were two standing ovations for our stars. It was so genuine, people just wanted to express their admiration.
Listen: Dr. Mary Randles and Sinead O'Shea talk to Dearbhail McDonald
Our distributors, Break Out, scheduled a cinema release for late April. We were a little concerned that people might not want to see another film about our Catholic past but we hoped the emotion of our Dublin screening might inspire new audiences to come.
We showed first in Navan and this too was an event with great meaning, I think, for both locals and our participants in particular. Their stories, they said, had been told properly, and now they felt seen and affirmed by their community. As Dr. Mary observed of Norman, "he seems to walk a little taller around the town."
Despite all our worries, there has been an overwhelming response to the film. It is the most attended documentary in Ireland this year and is continuing to screen at festivals around the world. It will soon be broadcast on television around Europe.
Dr. Mary and I were even invited to the Oireachtas for a screening there. This left us both feeling a little strange afterwards. Politicians had their photos taken with us but some of them subsequently voted for the deeply flawed mother and baby home redress scheme which has omitted nearly 50% of the survivors.
Now the film will be released on digital platforms in Ireland and the UK, and will find a new audience there.
I hope it inspires some reflection on where we came from, and where we are now.
It's not hard to join a fashionable cause when that's what everyone else is doing but Mary, Betty, Ethna and Norman took real risks in a much less forgiving context.
As the film concludes, there is always a way to resist.
