A labour history of Irish film and television drama production 1958 - 2016.

Abstract

Filmmaking in Ireland has been outward-looking since the early decades of the twentieth century, when film production activity in Ireland coincided with the first moves towards a globalised Hollywood production model. Despite the prototypical foreign direct investment represented by incoming productions from as early as the 1910s, however, there is little evidence that any significant native Irish labour was expended in their making until much later. The underuse of local labour would remain a challenge even after the establishment of Ardmore Studios in 1958, when the envisaged ‘skills transfer’ strategy for training native film workers was resisted by British trade union moves to protect the employment of their own members. This thesis presents a labour history of Irish film and television production, employing a political economy of labour perspective to explore the power relations operating at the point of production. The emphasis is on the role played by Irish film workers to control their own working destinies, through their efforts to secure access to work and to influence its quality in terms of remuneration, working conditions, job security, etc. The argument thus embraces organised labour but also the efforts of film workers in non-union organizations such as the Irish Film Workers Association. It includes worker lobby efforts to persuade the State to support a national film industry, as well as labour pressure placed on capital to secure employment and prevent its loss to other jurisdictions. The aim is to produce a local production history that explicates the Irish film industry as a “local instantiation” of a globalised industry. As Goldsmith et al. (2011: 28-29) have suggested, it is through this kind of local history that we might best understand the contribution of local social actors to “building and co-creating” the global production syste