The past was pretty grim. Archaeological evidence suggests that for much of human history mp3 players and DVD box sets of The Wire were unknown. Goodness only knows how people spent their time. PJ O’Rourke just says “dentistry” to anyone who tries to persuade him that things were better even just a few decades ago.

A couple of cinematic curios prove the point. Both are documentaries about fairly recent Irish society.

British Sea Power are a quirky little band whose work seldom disturbs any of the video chart shows. That seems to be their game plan. Taking a detour from rousing, off kilter indie anthems they released one of 2009’s odder concept albums. Man of Aran is a short film made in 1934 by Robert J. Flaherty. For reasons that might just have made sense at the time BSP decided that what it needed was to be reissued with a new score. If you buy the album you get the DVD of the film. Musically it works reasonably well but that’s not really the point.

It’s the grinding hardship of peasant life on a small island that is riveting. Flaherty took a little bit of creative licence. The fishing techniques shown hadn’t been used in half a century. This was just as well since they mostly involved getting into a small open boat, heading out into the swelling Atlantic and spending a couple of days chasing a bloody big shark. The liver oil was used for lamps.

The women didn’t have it much better. Small rocky islands which are constantly swept by salty gales don’t have the best soil. The islanders’ solution was to make the women and kids carry big baskets of seaweed from the beach up a cliff path to plots where it was used as fertiliser. Island men didn’t hold with mollycoddling or bread and roses.

Dinner was mostly potatoes. Dinner was always potatoes.

The film aims to give this hardship an almost heroic quality with handsome Celtic maidens staring out to sea as the men battle Poseidon. Yet this was nothing but utter grinding desperate misery which generations of peasants had to endure to survive. The interior shots of the homes reveal that there was virtually nothing in them and the viewer’s sense is that they were dark, claustrophobic shelters.

Exhibit two is Peter Lennon’s 1967 Rocky Road to Dublin , a film that was, for all practical purposes, banned in Ireland for holding up a mirror to a poverty stricken, priest ridden, banana republic. You can rent it from Love Film. (Other rental companies are available.)

Among other things it gives a list of writers who’d been banned in Ireland which was almost funny. If the censors had set out to compile a list of twentieth century writers worth reading they would not have done a better job. Steinbeck, Greene, Sartre…. The film censor Professor O’Briain, was, to contemporary eyes, something of a comedy turn. He didn’t sound as clever as you might expect a professor holding a high public office should and he spent quite a long time explaining how England had lost its morals. For slow learners who hadn’t picked up on his hints that it was his job to do what the Church told him he finished his lament for falling moral standards on an upbeat note. He was confident that the Church was rearming itself intellectually to deal with the modern world. A less than visionary assertion.

Seán Ó Faoláin articulated a prejudice widely held in Belfast , describing Dubliners as “urbanised peasants” who get by using charm, deceit and cunning. Much of the city’s service sector seems to have adopted this as a mission statement.

At least one school must have felt that it had been duped. A series of boys are shown reciting their catechism’s advice on avoiding immorality. Girls with mini skirts, bad company, some films books and plays top the naughty list. Illness, poverty and stupidity are attributed to original sin. The place resembled an illiberal madrassa.

Just twenty five years later that society, which has seemed so permanent, was becoming a fading memory. Yet till this day the Irish state refuses to take education out of the priests’ hands. The Irish bourgeoisie hasn’t answered the film’s rhetorical question “what do you do with your revolution once you’ve got it?”