Éire na Nuachtscannán, a six-part television series, is a collaboration between Mac Dara Ó Curraidhín (LM DÓC) and Ciara Chambers (Head of Film and Screen Media, University College Cork). It has been broadcast annually on TG4 since it was first screened in 2017.  It was based on the book Ireland in the Newsreels (Irish Academic Press, 2012) by Ciara Chambers.

While the newsreels were often dismissed for their triviality and light touch, they remain an important social document charting events, personalities and changing cultural patterns. Given the lack of sustained indigenous production, Irish audiences were catered for by British and American news producers, meaning that the newsreels viewed in the cinemas often had imperial connotations and were sometimes completely at odds with viewers’ lived experiences of the events depicted.

This series explores the ethics of news production, the complexities of representing shifting political allegiances, the difficulties of producing ‘balanced’ coverage and the ways in which audiences experiencing a range of turbulent events in twentieth-century Ireland were manipulated in the cinemas by companies used to catering for pro-establishment, British sensibilities.