These days, my father and I meet once a week. From Leitir Péic in Conamara I drive the half-hour west along Cois Fharraige and through the moon-like landscape of Bóthar Loch an Iolra to the townland of Tuairín, where Bob’s dwelling is almost entirely hidden from 30 years of tree planting. He is now 89 and there are always practical things to discuss, but we are rarely in the mood. Instead, we continue on to the village of An Cheathrú Rua where in the early evening we have our choice of seats in An Chistin pub and we settle down to talk about what matters – writing, thinking, ideas, music, the world.
It has always been like this. My father is known as a film-maker, photographer and writer, but beneath these pursuits is a relentless inquiry. That is why his artistic work is so polymathic, from the anarchic Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoire to the first Irish-language feature film Poitín to the intellectual explosion that is Atlantean. “A low threshold of boredom,” is his bald explanation, but there is more at play of course.
I have heard many different versions of my father’s public story, but the bones of it are true: in 1969, he walked out of employment with RTÉ as a protest against commercialism, published a damning critique of the broadcaster, made a controversial appearance on The Late Late Show, and then took refuge with my mother Helen and their young baby in the Conamara Gaeltacht.
After three years of trialing a number of careers, from writing television columns for the Western People to selling toffee apples to creating political batiks, Bob returned to making films as a result of the Gaeltacht Civil Rights Movement, set up a company named Cinegael, and he and my mother opened a small cinema. Over the next number of years, Cinegael produced a series of radical works that changed the course of Irish film.
But Bob’s cultural effect reached beyond that. Throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s he was also an outspoken and often ferocious critic of the broadcasting and film establishment, insisting that film-making was an art first and not simply an industry. In this, as in many endeavours, he was sailing against the wind. But there were always other ways to challenge the consensus.
[ From the archive: Bob Quinn: ‘Ireland is part of the evil empire’Opens in new window ]
In 1987 he and a number of Irish-language activists set up a pirate television station in Conamara that eventually led to the founding of the channel TG4. The impact on the Gaeltacht and the language was profound. He also railed against consumerism and the impact of television advertising on society, and in one chatshow appearance emptied a black sack of domestic refuse out at the presenter’s feet.
In 1995, in a twist worthy of Hollywood, the then minister for arts, culture and the Gaeltacht, Michael D Higgins, appointed Bob to the RTÉ Authority. Twenty-six years after he walked out of the broadcaster he was back – and with no lessening of his reforming views on Irish broadcasting. A one-line postcard from a friend captured the moment: “The lunatics have taken over the asylum.”
Bob set about proposing his reforming agenda in RTÉ – banning advertising towards children, regionalisation of the service, clear lines between editorial content and advertising, encouraging new talent, and more independence for programme-makers – but his ideas soon hit organisational thinking.
Without serving the full term, he resigned and published his controversial book Maverick, blowing the whistle on how RTÉ worked on the inside. “RTÉ was out of control,” he wrote. He was not thanked. On RTÉ radio he was accused of being “disloyal” and his thinking was dismissed as naive and impractical. Angry but not surprised, Bob returned to Conamara, continued planting trees, producing films, writing books and photographing life around him.
There is a cultural lesson in what happened next. In the summer of 2023, 22 years after Maverick, RTÉ became engulfed in another crisis because of the very issues that Bob had been trying to address, and suddenly his thinking and solutions became mainstream. I asked him what he thought of the fact that the ideas he proposed two decades ago were now being discussed on daytime radio. “Of course,” he said.
Ever since I was young, I was conscious of being “Bob Quinn’s son”. He seemed to attract both curiosity and regard – the man who made Poitín, who heard a connection between Conamara sean-nós and North African music, who spoke his mind, refused to fit in and made things difficult – this applied at home as much as in his work. One morning at secondary school, the vice-principal sidled up to me. “Have you read that book yet?” he demanded. It turned out he was referring to Smokey Hollow, Bob’s fictionalised memoir that had just been announced in the papers.
I didn’t always know what my father was doing. After my parents separated, my siblings and I lived in Bray and Bob returned to Conamara, where the family had previously lived from 1970 to 1980. Henceforth, for every school holiday – summer, Halloween, Christmas and Easter – we would travel west to Galway, a three-hour train journey, to live another life for weeks or months at a time in the Gaeltacht with Bob, Miriam and our two new younger brothers. It was a house where artists would arrive unannounced and stay for days, dinner conversation was bracing, music was played into the night and every morning I would be woken by the sound of Bob’s tapping on the typewriter or, later, a computer, downstairs.
“I have to invent my reality every day,” he would tell me. It was true. Unlike other fathers, he didn’t seem to have a job, but he never stopped working. He lived in an old factory by a lake and his office was at the end of the house with my attic bedroom above it, so his work patterns were always known to me.
The day would begin in the kitchen with black coffee, pipe smoke, collecting the post and reading The Irish Times, and then – in a mini-eruption – the paper would be folded and cast down on the table. “Half-nine and not a child in the house washed,” he would pronounce, then disappear down to the office.
The working day would be punctuated by an ink-jet printer screaming as it tried to work through whatever script, book or finance-raising correspondence he was working on. While printer paper fell to the floor, he would march up the corridor for a lettuce sandwich, or walk around the house with his hands behind his back, thinking, pausing to foot the turf or shake his head and pick up a child’s bike left rusting in the rain, then remind us to hang up our togs and towel from the beach, and return to the office.
When he wasn’t working, there were events to attend or matters to be seen to; one of my teenage memories is travelling at night through south Conamara with Bob, checking every pub’s television for the signal from the Irish-language pirate television station. On other occasions it might be an exhibition in Clifden, a screening in Derry or a Gaeltacht community occasion that needed support.
But while everyone sat dutifully and listened to whatever was taking place, Bob would wander around the action and take photographs. The camera was his freedom. He refused to sit and conform, regardless of what was taking place or who was there, clinging to his creative approach no matter what was happening.
And people seemed to love him for it. They stopped him on the street to engage in conversation about his Atlantean theory; when we screened Budawanny together one summer in Galway, the audience would come around to the projectionist’s box afterwards and tell him how affecting the film was; the phone would ring and it would be Mike Scott from the Waterboys or Bono from U2. Everyone wanted to talk to this man, who didn’t seem to care what he said or who he was talking to.
When I was 23, Bob told me he was going to India with his camera. I invited myself and my fiddle along and we were joined by his close friend, Denis “Dinno” Ryan. Beginning in Goa, we journeyed down the west coast by train to Kochi and Kerala and then back up again to Mumbai. Each evening, we would drink, smoke and discuss this extraordinary Indian culture, drawing comparisons with our own music and history, trying and failing to understand.
But it was on that trip that I learnt to talk to Bob, and he learnt to talk to me, and that is why we still enjoy a good conversation. When we meet in An Chistin, we go back and forward discussing the madness of the world, but generally agree on Bob’s philosophy, which he draws from Antonio Gramsci: pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will, which basically means that, while ultimately doing anything about anything may be futile, you have to be doing something.
An rud a bhíonn sa chú bíonn sé sa choileán – whatever is in the hound is in the pup. In one such pub conversation, I suggested to Bob that we put together a collection of his writing. I was conscious of the young artists and thinkers who still make their way to his door, who look to him for perspective in the confusing place that is the world today. A book of his writing would at least provide one insight: how to achieve the impossible, with very little, and when everyone says you are wrong.
This collection, dating from the 1960s to the 2020s, provides some indication of the range of topics that have occupied him over seven decades of artistic, activist and intellectual work. The essays and articles document his exploits in film and broadcasting, his travels and campaigning, his love for Conamara, and include some startling experiences too. They capture something of his extraordinary life, and will, I am sure, start many new conversations.
Count Me Out: Selected Writing of Filmmaker Bob Quinn, edited by Toner Quinn, is published by Boluisce Press and will be available on February 20th
