(1965)

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Back in 1965, when the notion of an indigenous Irish film industry seemed like a flight of pure fantasy, a bunch of brave souls set out to make the first truly Irish musical: a bawdy, boisterous comedy with overtones of The Threepenny Opera, based on some of the country's favourite ballads, and featuring some of its best-known performers.

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Taking as its starting point the song The Night Before Larry Got Stretched, O'Donoghue's Opera stars Ronnie Drew as "the cleverest burglar in all Ireland" and features appearances by Seamus Ennis, The Dubliners, the McKenna Folk Group and the Grehan Sisters. The beautiful 35 millimetre black-and-white footage of music sessions in O'Donoghue's pub on Merrion Row shows Dublin bohemian life at the start of the folk music boom - duffel-coated beat kids mingling with crinkly traditional types over innumerable pints of stout. It's a fascinating glimpse of a world which now seems very far away.

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Abandoned due to lack of finance and never completed, the film disappeared for more than 30 years, until the cutting copy showed up in 1997. Filmmaker and producer Sé Merry Doyle set about painstakingly reconstructing the film from the existing footage, and he joins us for a post-screening talk about the film's significance, and the process of reviving it, Tim Finnegan-like, from the ashes.