Martin McLoone's book Irish Film: The Emergence of a National Cinema
             suggests that Ireland's recent birth of a creative and fertile film
             industry, particularly with films such as "The Crying Game" and "My Left
             Foot," has functioned as a kind of response to Hollywood and English
             representations of Ireland film. In particular, recent English portrayals
             of Irish violence as a "Celtic Tiger" of Catholicism, poverty, and anger,
             has been answered with filmed depictions such as "The Crying Game" that
             show that even IRA members have reasons and rationales behind their
             actions. Even so-called Irish terrorists, the film suggests, are not pure
             monsters. The activist who keeps the British solider captive takes
             interest in the man's girlfriend, showing that he too is human, with human
             desires. "My Left Foot" encompasses both the sentimental beauty of the
             Irish landscape, as well as the human, common drama of the frustration of
             living with a disability and also the parent's perspective of raising a
             gifted child with a disabilityâ€"a subject that is anything but beautiful,
             This filmed humanization of the actors of the Irish trouble's of
             recent date may be said to function as a kind of response to the anger of
             the Irish during the 1970's. Irish films of this time frame, which
             transpired shortly after the British occupation of Northern Ireland, were
             often quite militant in theme and showed a strong British versus Irish
             conflict with an absence of any humanization of the British side. To be
             Irish, it was implied, was to be anti-British and anti-English, and
             preferably anti-Protestant. But recently, not only have individual English
             people been more positively portrayed in Irish filmâ€"although the policies
             of the English legal system and English government continue to be
             criticized in films such as "In the Name of the Father," but a greater
             ...