ABSTRACT
The early days of Irish cinema coincided with an incendiary period in Irish history that would eventually lead to the Easter Rising of 1916 and culminate in independence and civil war. As the Lumière Brothers’ cameraman, Alexandre Promio shot images of Dublin’s main thoroughfare, Sackville Street (1897) 1 Catholic nationalism was emerging as the dominant political force outside of Ulster. The rise of an educated merchant class in the wake of the successions of famines in the mid to late nineteenth century and the achievement of the Protestant landlord, Charles Stewart Parnell, in uniting this class under the Home Rule banner meant that from 1885 onwards nationalist politics moved into a new constitutional, democratic phase.
