It’s sideways rain, stars and Shop Street – surely it must be Galway

I WAS in Galway City at the weekend for the 35th annual Film Fleadh where I had the pleasure of seeing about 24 short films in the space of two days. It was terrific. 

Unfortunately, the weather was particularly on brand for the Wesht of Ireland and we had to endure the sort of sideways Atlantic rain for which the place is known. 

You couldn’t move for Yanks in ponchos shuffling around Shop Street where the craic is still to be had in large, rather heavily-laid-on doses.

A friend asked me how I got on there on my return to Dublin on Monday. It was great I said, the film festival was brilliant but Galway isn’t half as interesting as it thinks it is. To which he replied – ‘That’s the most Cork thing I think I’ve ever heard anyone say.’ Touché.

Believe it or not, the actor’s strike in Hollywood was already making its presence felt at the festival. 

A photocall with actor Matthew Modine who was in town for the premiere of The Martini Shot was cancelled. This was in the wake of Cillian Murphy and his co-stars walking out of the Oppenheimer premiere last week. 

It’s all to do with the SAG-AFTRA strike. 

No, this isn’t the name of some obscure satellite dish that broadcasts German TV, it’s the combined unions of Hollywood writers and actors who have downed tools in LA in protest against the way creatives have been treated by the larger studios and corporations who run the town.

The gloves are most definitely off. 

The strike is the first of its scale in 40 years and will likely hit our screens, big and small, in the months ahead. 

The new season of Stranger Things looks likely to be delayed. The How To Train Your Dragon filming in Belfast has been paused. 

And no doubt about a thousand stupid superhero movies will have to be put on ice too. 

The trouble is that the movie and entertainment business has failed to recover after Covid. 

The return to the cinemas has been slow, and the arse has fallen out of the streaming business. 

The main reason is that ever since shareholders began to actually assess the business model of how streaming works, they soon realised how utterly off-the-wall the valuations of these companies were. 

Actors and writers are also annoyed that the corporations want to do what they want with new advances in Artificial Intelligence including using AI-generated versions of stars to make new movies for a fraction of the price, and even getting ChatGPT to write scripts for them. 

A colleague in the business, who works as a manager in LA, recently told me that the last time this happened, the business created reality TV to fill the schedules. 

This led to a million hours of crap flooding global TV screens and, ultimately, to The Apprentice, and therefore Donald Trump and the undermining of American democracy.  

It is perhaps a leap too far to blame everything on that one strike, but still ...!

There is a theme here, which echoes the larger argument taking place in RTÉ, about fairness in the workplace and the loss of a sense of equality in recent times, when a winner-takes-all attitude has seeped into the executive classes at the expense of any share in the spoils for the actual workers behind the scenes.

It reminds me of the banks when failures would be socialised, but success poured back into the 1% at the top whose greed ended up bringing down the whole financial system in the first place. 

During our lifetimes, these debates about fairness and equity are likely to take a firmer hold on the conversations we have in the West, especially in the context of a denuded jobs market with many roles cancelled out by AI systems. 

The point will come when we all have to ask – when is enough, enough? What is all this growth and productivity doing to our planet in the long run? What would happen if we all agreed to grab less, invest more in the systems that should take care of us, share the wealth and reduce our rabid consumption in the face of a planet choking from the extent of our excess?  

Not that it’s gonna stop me from going to see Cillian Murphy on the big screen later this week, mind you!

Is it too hot to holiday?

YOU wouldn’t know it from the sideways rain in Galway at the weekend, but the monsoon rain that greeted us in Dublin during the week certainly reminded us that we are not in Kansas anymore, when it comes to the climate. 

Or rather, we are all in Kansas all of the time now and on the verge of being carried off in a tornado at any moment. 

This all followed the truly terrifying stories coming through from southern Europe, and indeed all across the world, of areas entering temperatures unsafe for human habitation. 

It certainly puts a new consideration into the summer holiday planning, and I’d be slow to book a week away during the summer months in France, Spain or Italy in the coming years. Although that is likely to be the least of our worries.  

Skulls finally headin’ home

IT was an extraordinary sight to see a coffin carrying 13 skulls to the ruins of St Colman’s Abbey on Inishbofin last week.

The skulls had been stolen by anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon in 1890 and taken to Trinity College for scientific research. He called himself an anthropologist, I prefer to use ‘graverobber’ myself. 

It was moving to see part of the ceremony and goes to show that your homeplace is always calling, even 133 years later. Your own people will always have your back.

So if my bones are ever nicked by some langer from Trinity and experimented on in the name of ‘science’, ye know what to do.