OLDEST IRISH AMERICAN NEWSPAPER IN USA, ESTABLISHED IN 1928
Category: Archive

Anonymous buyer gets 1916 footage

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

By Andrew Bushe

DUBLIN — Rare film footage of the 1916 Rising and other historic events has been sold for £95,000 to an anonymous buyer at an auction in Dublin.

The archive, which covers almost half a century and includes President John F. Kennedy’s visit in 1963, was compiled by a collector whose heir decided to sell it.

Much of the material is newsreel filmed by a freelance cameraman that was sold to news agencies and the copyright surrounding it is unclear. Part of it is unwanted "out-takes," which have never been seen by the public before.

The 12 cans of film running for about three hours were sold by the Whyte’s auctioneering firm in Dublin.

The material includes unique footage of the wedding of Sean MacEoin in June 1922, attended by Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins shortly before their deaths.

Sign up to The Irish Echo Newsletter

Brian O’Shea, heritage spokesman for the Labor Party, had called on the government to buy the material for the Irish Film Archive and ensure it did not leave the country.

Arts and Heritage Minister Sile De Valera said that most of the film was already held by the National Library.

She is arranging for the purchase of the MacEoin wedding coverage from the copyright owner for the library.

Griffith died from an illness a week before Collins’s assassination by anti-treaty forces in Cork. The archive also includes coverage of Collins’s state funeral.

The film covers the 1916 Rising and the damage done to the center of the city by the fighting.

It also includes coverage of the aftermath of the first Bloody Sunday in 1920, when the Black and Tans opened fire in Croke Park during a GAA match. Eleven spectators and the captain of the Tipperary team were shot in the atrocity, which followed the IRA’s murder of 14 British agents.

It also captures the fighting at the Custom House and the Four Courts buildings during the Civil War.

There is also footage of Air Corps Col. James Fitzmaurice’s first east-west transatlantic flight from Baldonnel ‘rodrome to Greenly Island, Canada, in 1928.

Other Articles You Might Like

Sign up to our Daily Newsletter

Click to access the login or register cheese