Movie Documentary: 32 Mountains in 32 Days
‘Unless there’s wildness round you, something terrible happens to the wildness inside of you.’
To Meet the Gods as Equals
This week, I’m breaking with my usual habit of publishing only my own work to share a documentary made by some friends of ours with which I find the deepest empathy, and which summons up possibly better than anything we have yet encountered the secret spirit that enables us to survive the tyrannies of our times.
In November 2021, in the very depths of the darkness that had enveloped Ireland and the world from the spring of 2020, three Irish artists embarked on an epic mission to plant the flag of the historic Irish nation at the summits of the highest mountains in each of the island’s 32 counties.
The result is this movie, 32 Counties — A Quest for Hope in a Time of Darkness — just short of 69 minutes in length, the record of a month-long odyssey though Ireland, forging friendships, iconographies and unforgettable sentences of hope and faith.
The movie, which had its world premiere in Ireland on Bloomsday, June 16th, 2023, begins with a quote from the great Irish philosopher and mystic, John Moriarty:
‘Unless there’s wildness round you, something terrible happens to the wildness inside of you.’
The three artists — Aidan Killian, comedian; Tiernan O’Rourke, musician; and Stephen Murphy, poet — came together as though brothers and set out on a quest to call in the intentions of love, healing and freedom to the land of Éire in one of its darkest hours. In 32 days they planted 32 flags on 32 mountains in the 32 counties of this sacred island.
The flag they chose was not the tricolour of contemporary usage, but the ancient flag of the Irish Citizens’ Army, immortalised as the flag referred to in the opening words of the 1916 Proclamation:
IRISHMEN AND IRISHWOMEN:
In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.
The previous year, Padraic Pearse, director of the Irish Volunteers, issued an order requiring that every company of the Volunteers was to provide itself with an Irish Flag, adding:
The authorised flag is a plain gold harp on a green ground and no other flag, except authorised regimental colours, is to be carried by bodies of Irish Volunteers.