ABSTRACT
The economic and ideological changes in the South helped lead to a shift towards political fragmentation and class politics. The instability of traditional political allegiances from the 1973 general election onwards is one indicator of these internal changes. Closer scrutiny of the South itself began to replace the traditional displacement of all Ireland's wrongs on to the old enemy. The socioeconomic changes which have become manifest since the 1960s have brought in their wake significant diversity and originality to Irish artistic production as well as critical and interpretative assessments of Ireland's past and present. History itself as a site of struggle in contemporary Ireland and the first filmic steps towards a more critical assessment of Ireland's past were taken rather surprisingly by one of the inheritors of the radical nationalist past, Official Sinn Fein, now The Workers Party. The film they sponsored, Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoire, was described by one national film critic as a 'breakthrough'.
