SEVEN REASONS WHY THE RECESSION IS GOOD NEWS FOR IRISH CINEMA!

Think it's all doom and gloom now that the country has gone bust? Wondering if there are any good news to come out of this recession. Well for Irish cinema it's the best thing to happen since that Anton review on The View.

No more Celtic Tiger movies
Read that again! No. More. Celtic. Tiger. Movies. That is a very good thing indeed. Why? Because it was the worst sub-genre in Irish cinema. Some twentysomething character fresh out of an Arts degree sipping coffee in a trendy Dublin establishment - with samba music on the soundtrack. What a pile of pretentious crap! Really sad stuff. So bad that each week in Dublin I now walk past closed-down restaurants with a smug grin on my face.

We now do actually have stories to tell
NO, not the ones where the son and dad live on a bog in 1957 and a distant relative arrives home from the States to claim the farm! Now we really do have stories to tell: negative equity; emigration; racism; unemployment; poverty; floodings; bankers getting flogged in public?

(Almost) Everyone is jobless
Right, what's the best thing to happen in years? People out of work with nothing to do? Go and make movies! It's that simple. Plenty of time now that the old call-centre job has gone to India. What a better way to spend all that free time than make your own film stuff?

No more Tourist Board stuff!
OK, the Yanks can still come here and make 'I love P.S. poor movies' but the Irish stuff is no longer aimed at the Tourist market. Now because they don't come here anymore. We're too expensive, have a bad international image, and they will be attacked by Romanian gypsies at ATMs. So no more filtered shots of islands and colleens with long hair. Great!

Lower budgets
There is less money to go round so film budgets will drop. That shoud mean rawer filmmaking and less gloss? Less waste and more control. Better films should result. Heck, we might even get a few black and white features for a change?

Increased anger!
Anger is a energy. More anger in Irish films would be better indeed than the bland, insipid cinema which gets made too much here.

Less hype?
Filmmakers have a more realistic view on their work now because the public question everything. So no more over-hyped Irish movies that only annoy and make people want to slate before they've been seen?