Donnybrook: Big and Little Things

The last thing I really wanted to do was watch some Hollywood movie on the failings of the Catholic Church, especially in Ireland. The Church disgraces of recent times are a miserable and depressing chronicle.

I impulsively thought the release last month of “Small Things Like These” was just another opportunity for those on the squishy left and those on the Christian Nationalist right to join in on Catholic bashing, one of the few prejudices seemingly still sanctioned by both the far right and the far left.

However, when I focused to remember that this film was based upon Ireland’s Claire Keegan’s book of the same name.

Keegan, the recipient of the Irish Book Awards Author of the Year Award (2023), and the writer for the basis of the beautiful movie, “The Quiet Girl” (nominated for Academy Award for Best International Film 2023) as well as several other well received novellas, had me thinking of taking a look at this movie. And then to see that the film was produced by and starred the ever-watchable Cillian Murphy (“Oppenheimer,” “Wind that Shakes the Barley,” “Dunkirk,” “Peaky Blinders. …”), I concluded it was worth checking out.

In addition to his acting skills, I still chuckle at the time Cillian was introduced to Prince Harry, who said to Murphy: “Your English. Murphy answered, no Irish. Harry kept pushing, and said Oh you mean British. Murphy said, “No, I am Irish, a big difference.”

Regardless, I am glad I did go to see the movie and I would encourage you to give it a go. The cinematography is excellent, the acting is great, and the themes are universal.

Murphy plays coal man Bill Furlong, from New Ross, County Wexford (home of the JFK Kennedy Clan) and the site of one of the Magdelene laundries; brutal workhouses for young women who found themselves pregnant without the benefit of marriage. The newborns were taken from the young mothers and put up for adoption in Ireland and the U.S.A.

One of the lines, “Sometimes you have to ignore things to get ahead” sort of sums up the age-old, universal human quandary of choosing to speak out against injustice or to keep quiet to “get ahead.” The book and the film are less about bashing Church clergy, but rather, turning it around to our own, individual choices and how we respond to injustice put before one.

It hit home with me, as I was living in Ireland around the time this film was set. How did we not see any of this? As we enter uncertain times in our own beloved U.S. of A., I hope we will follow the lead of Bill Furlong, searching our own souls and choosing what is right and just.