This essay argues that Martin McDonagh’s 2023 movie The Banshees of Inisherin, in its focus on the conflict that unfolds between two friends, Pádraic and Colm, on the fictional island of Inisherin (an amalgam of ‘Inisheer,’ one of the Aran Islands, and ‘Erin,’ another name for Ireland), is most obviously a fable about the Irish Civil War as a grotesque, self-inflicted wound. Less obviously, however, it points ahead, via the subtle use of anachronisms and analogies between the film and McDonagh’s 2001 play The Lieutenant of Inishmore, to the long-term escalation of the border conflict that was initiated by the signing of the Treaty in 1922 and only ended with the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Through the islanders’ lack of response to the local policeman’s physical and sexual abuse of his son, Dominic, the movie also addresses the way in which silence and avoidance, which began as mechanisms for coping with the atrocities of the Civil War that had fatally divided friends and families, gradually evolved into a broader climate of denial and evasion that allowed abusive and transgressive actions by those in positions of power in Church and State to go unchallenged well into the twentieth century.
José Lanters (Sat,) studied this question.