From the international successes of Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan, to the smaller productions of the new generation of Irish filmmakers, the recent flowering of Irish cinema may be seen as a symbol of the nation's emergence from the backwaters of twentieth century culture into the mainstream of the global economy. In a country where the modern has been long regarded as a source of suspicion, cinema has occupied a fraught position within Irish society. Attacked by the Church for its detrimental influence on the faithful, regarded by the left as a tool of capitalism and by the Republican movement as a weapon of imperialism, it provided the battleground for the competing discourses within the emergent State during the early years of the twentieth century. At the same time, for the emigrant Irish, particularly of Britain and America, the cinema articulated, responded to and fashioned their experiences of departure and arrival. Irish National Cinema argues that in order to understand the unique position of filmmaking in Ireland and the inheritance on which contemporary filmmakers draw, definitions of the Irish culture and identity must take into account the so-called Irish diaspora and engage with its cinema. In a series of chapters on contemporary Irish filmmaking, this book further reflects on questions of nationalism, gender identities, the representation of the Troubles and of Irish history as well as cinema's response to the so-called Celtic Tiger and its aftermath.