Arts Week with Judy Murphy

Film director Ruán Magan attributes his long and fruitful relationship with Irish language broadcaster TG4 to the influence of his late grandmother, Sighle Humphreys. An Irish-language activist and republican, she passed on her passion for the language and culture to Ruán and his brother Manchán.

Sighle died when Ruán was about 25, in the mid-1990s, around the time Teilifís na Gaeilge, now TG4, was being established in Baile na hAbhann.

Out of loyalty to his grandmother, Ruán decided he should do some work for the new station.

At the time, he was a young filmmaker, climbing the industry ladder, whose credits included working as a location manager for Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins and as a line producer on Bogwoman, directed by the late Tom Collins.

So, Ruán wrote a letter to TnaG, suggesting that if they gave him a camera, he could travel to India, where Manchán was living, and they’d create something worth watching.

That was done with consulting with Manchán, he adds with a laugh. But TnaG obliged and the result was a series of travel documentaries for the station that took the Dublin brothers all over the world.

They’d been reared in Donnybrook in middle-class surroundings, but their maternal grandmother had kept the family’s traditional republican flame alive.

In the 1960s, Sighle Humphreys was part of the campaign for a State-operated Irish language radio station.

And she was a republican sympathiser all her life. She lived with Ruán’s family in her later years and escapees from the Maze Prison could find refuge in her area of the house.

“It gave my father a canary anytime he saw one,” her grandson laughs.

Ruán is one of the country’s finest directors, working mostly on documentaries, sometimes with international collaborators. He has experience in drama too, including for TG4, “who have been incredibly supportive”, he says. “They have given me a push every time I needed it and supported my career the whole way through. They developed me as an Irish-language director.”

Ruán’s latest project involving TG4 is the Irish language feature Báite, produced by Galway company Danú Media. Part-funded by the TV station, it will premiere at Galway Film Fleadh next Wednesday, July 9.

Pictured: Actors Moe Dunford (Frank), and Eleanor O’Brien (Peggy) in the film, set in a rural village in the 1970s. Life changes forever for Peggy when a woman’s body is found in a local lake.