Ó Laoghaire, Colm

by Linde Lunney

Ó Laoghaire, Colm (1919–2007), filmmaker, was born on 8 September 1919 in Dublin, the only son of Jeremiah O'Leary (see below), an ITGWU official, and his wife Philomena ('Mimi') O'Leary (née Plunkett). Mimi was a daughter of Count George Noble Plunkett (qv) and sister of Joseph Mary Plunkett (qv), one of the executed leaders of the Easter 1916 rising; her two other brothers, George Oliver Plunkett (qv) and Jack Plunkett, also fought in the rising. As a young woman, along with her sister Fiona, Mimi was a deeply committed member of Cumann na mBan, and taught first aid classes in 1915, preparing for a planned rebellion. In March 1916 the leaders of the IRB realised that plans to bring in arms from Germany would have to be changed, but could not communicate directly from Ireland with Germany because of wartime hostilities. Mimi was chosen as the courier to carry a coded message to John Devoy (qv) and other supporters in New York. She arrived on 14 April 1916, and a telegram was sent to Berlin by the German embassy, but it was too late to stop the arms being sent to Ireland on board the Aud, which had no wireless.

Jeremiah (Dermot; Diarmuid) O'Leary (1889–1960), trade unionist, republican and civil servant, was born in Colchester, England, son of Wexford-born parents James Aloysius O'Leary and his wife Catherine, who both supported Irish nationalist ideals. He was brought up in London, where he was active in the Gaelic League and, from about 1908, in the IRB. He avoided conscription into the British army because he was lame. For several years he organised the acquisition of weapons for the republican movement and travelled to Dublin with a trunk full of guns on Maundy Thursday, 20 April 1916. During the Easter rising, he reported to the GPO, was detailed to put up copies of the proclamation of the Irish republic, gathered information by pretending to be an English tourist, and was told by Patrick Pearse (qv) to organise a detachment to stop looting. After the rising, he was interned in Frongoch until Christmas 1916, and was Sinn Féin director of elections in the Pembroke constituency in the 1918 general election; he also ran an office for the Volunteers in Bachelors Walk, Dublin, along with Michael Collins (qv). After his marriage to Mimi Plunkett in 1918, their house in Marlborough Road, Donnybrook, was a 'constant centre of operations and activities of the Plunkett family in their various military responsibilities. Frequent meetings of engineers, Cumann na mBan and other groups took place. Dumps of explosives, ammunition and arms were passing regularly in and out. The Irish Bulletin had their longest stay of any premises in my house. Secret recesses in furniture held maps and documents of the various councils. [Volunteers] regularly used my house for rest, and we also had wounded men for long periods' (BMH, WS 1108).

During 1919–21, police and army frequently raided and searched the house, even ripping up all the floorboards. Once Mimi O'Leary was held for hours, and refused permission to breastfeed Colm, who was only a few months old. During the civil war (1922–3) and through the 1930s, Colm's Plunkett uncles and aunt were active on the anti-treaty side. Mimi O'Leary died young in December 1926, when Colm was just seven years old, and a younger brother Rory died in March 1927, aged two. Diarmuid O'Leary got over 1,000 votes standing unsuccessfully as a Labour candidate in Kerry in the June 1927 general election, and that same year quit the ITGWU to become an industrial inspector in the Department of Industry and Commerce. With his second wife, Frances, he had a daughter in 1942. He died on 3 January 1960 in St Laurence's Hospital, Dublin, and was buried in Glasnevin cemetery with his first wife.

Though Colm retained a lifelong love of the Irish language through which classes were taught in Coláiste Mhuire, a fee-paying secondary school in Parnell Square, he hated the strict discipline of the Christian Brothers and frequently rebelled or played truant. His father consequently sent him to board in St Joseph's College, Garbally Park, Ballinasloe, Co. Galway, and after that he started, but did not complete, a degree in engineering in UCD. His involvement in republican politics probably contributed to his lack of progress in UCD; as a member of the IRA, he was interned in the Curragh for part of the second world war emergency. In 1951 he spoke at meetings in Co. Roscommon in support of Michael A. Kelly (1912–77), a Clann na Poblachta candidate, and he was later a member of the Labour Party.

During his time in UCD, Ó Laoghaire joined first the college dramatic society and then the Irish Film Society, recently established by Liam O'Leary (qv) (no near relation), and was for several years its secretary or treasurer. In 1940 he attended informal classes in the society's school of film technique, and helped other film enthusiasts make short films. His first film, made for the Irish-language organisation Ghlúin na Buaidhe, was shown to crowds on O'Connell Street. Ó Laoghaire at first operated the camera, but later moved into producing and direction, writing his own scripts in Irish. In 1946 he secured his first professional film job, working on the Brendan Stafford film A nation once again, commissioned the year previously to celebrate the centenary of the death of Thomas Davis (qv). That year Ó Laoghaire also made a film about an emergency harvest, when hundreds of volunteers from Ireland's cities and towns helped salvage threatened crops in bad weather; no sponsorship to finish production was forthcoming at the time, but the film footage was re-edited and made into an RTÉ television programme fifty years later, and broadcast in 1997.

With Kevin O'Kelly (qv), Ó Laoghaire helped set up a film production company, Comhar Cino, and made a number of short promotional films. Some were for government departments, to convey public information on topics such as road safety; others, for Bord Fáilte, like Irish gossamer (1957), promoted tourism, and for a time he was head of the photographic section of Bord Fáilte. Ó Laoghaire was particularly keen to promote the Irish language and was one of the handful of activists who supported Dónall Ó Móráin (qv) when he founded Gael Linn in 1953. Ó Laoghaire wanted to help show that Irish could have a place in the modern world, while still providing a link to the heritage of the past, and with Gael Linn initiated a project to make short films in Irish. Together they secured a contract with the J. Arthur Rank Organisation, which supplied weekly newsreels to Irish cinemas, to show their films nationwide. Ó Laoghaire in 1956 made the first three films of the first ever Irish-language documentary and news series, Amharc Éireann (View of Ireland). He hoped that the films would help the Irish language gain wider acceptance, at a time when cinema attendance was at its peak. The concomitant ambition, more or less consciously articulated, was to replace the British version of news and views that had previously been evident in imported newsreels. Ó Laoghaire aspired to emulate the techniques of European documentary filmmaking, and aspects of his work are reminiscent of the tropes of progress and idealised labour familiar from contemporary Russian film. His work asserts the importance of the Irish language in a strongly nationalist, mid-twentieth-century version of Irishness in which, rather naively perhaps, modern economic development was not seen as a threat to traditional identity.

From 1956 to 1959, Ó Laoghaire produced, directed, scripted and edited thirty-four of the first thirty-six short monthly films, each dealing with a particular topic. The difficulties of producing films so quickly, at a time when they had to be physically transported for processing back and forth to London, somewhat compromised the artistry of which Ó Laoghaire had shown himself capable, but the series as a whole is a monument to pioneering enthusiasms as well as to ways of life then vanishing. With the advent of television news changing the role of the cinema in Great Britain, the Rank Organisation ceased supplying newsreels to cinemas in 1959. Gael Linn and Ó Laoghaire decided to switch to a weekly news magazine format, and the new series lasted until 1964; altogether, 269 four-minute films were shown from 1959 to 1964. The material in Amharc Éireann as a whole forms one of the most important archives of the 1950s and 1960s, and is often used by television programmes and media historians. Subject matter included snapshots of new and old industries, magazine-type films about particular areas, and human interest stories such as Our neighbour's children, a 1960 item about polio victims in a hospital near Dublin. He was the first Irish prize winner at the Cork Film Festival with Water wisdom (1962), a film made to encourage communal piped water schemes in rural Ireland.

The availability of television news in Ireland ended the use of newsreels in cinemas, and in 1966 Ó Laoghaire went to work in Telefís Éireann. He continued to work on programmes focusing on Ireland and using the Irish language, such as Aos óg and Feach, and also made programmes in gaeltacht areas. His films from this period included The most gallant gentleman (1966), an account of the return to Ireland in 1965 of the exhumed remains of Roger Casement (qv). In 1994 the Irish Film Archive presented a tribute to him, showing several of his films. He stands as one of Ireland's most important film documentary makers, and his work has increasingly been explored for its historical and sociological significance, which is not limited to its content, but also to the methods and beliefs on which it was based.

Ó Laoghaire married Nora Mallon in Castleblayney, Co. Monaghan, on 5 September 1950; she survived him with their three sons and three daughters, when he died in their home in Donnybrook, Dublin, on 26 December 2007.