The groundbreaking emergence of some of the most subversive voices in the panorama of Contemporary Irish fiction and cinema is currently represented by writers and filmmakers who have concentrated on disrupting the cultural practices of silence in contemporary Ireland where many forms of abuse, kept secret for a long time, have recently aroused public opinion on an international scale. In an address to Dáil Éireann in March 2017, former Taoiseach Enda Kenny, referring to the discovery of a mass grave with the remains of children at the site of an old mother and baby home in Tuam, Co. Galway, denounced an Irish society that was complicit with what he described as Ireland’s “social and cultural sepulchre”. For their part, many of the Irish victims and survivors of different forms of institutional abuse have complained that the official reports remain to this day filled with “omissions and inaccuracies”. As the former Taoiseach’s metaphor suggests, these “inconvenient truths” are deeply embedded in the Irish collective imaginary.
The inTRUTHS Project focuses on exploring how contemporary Irish writers and filmmakers have turned their attention to silenced stories and unrecorded truths which the normative/institutional discourses had suppressed because of their being “anomalies” diverging from the official truth. The project aims to flesh out the ethical implications of this form of writing and filmmaking as a privileged site of resistance to habitual cultural practices of silence. Dr. Seán Crosson is a Work Team Partner (with a particular focus on examining silence in contemporary Irish cinema) on this project led by Dr. M. Teresa Caneda Cabrera (PI) (University of Vigo) and including partners in the University of Alcalá de Henares, University of Deusto, KU Leuven, and University College Cork. The project is funded by the Spanish Agency for Research (AEI) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF)
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