Our new film celebrates famed architect Liam McCormick’s vision for St Michael’s Church in Creeslough.
St Michael’s Church on Creeslough’s Main Street has fascinated and captivated passers-by for the last five decades with its distinctive outline and impressive design features.
The new film, called “The Church & The Mountain” aims to tell the viewers about the history of how the building came to be.
It features Dan McTeague, Letterkenny, Ken Bond, Portnablagh, Danny Langan from Creeslough, Margaret O’Brien from Ards, Fr Martin Doohan PP of Clondahorky Parish, and curate of St Michael’s Church, Fr John Joe Duffy.
The film also features a wealth of archive footage filmed by the trusty 8mm cine camera of the late, great, Canon Tommy Doherty as well as other archive material from a range of local sources.
Canon Doherty was passionate about filmmaking throughout his life and his work is a remarkable record of the people and places of yesteryear.
At various intervals through the building process from the late 1960’s, through to 1971, he would visit the site to capture each stage of the development work, as well as those who happen to pass by, or stop and view the work while he was there.
This amazing footage shows, in colour, the whole process of the construction of the chapel, from green field site next to “Johnny’s Barn” right through to the official opening and consecration by Bishop Anthony McFeely.
This footage was donated to the project by Canon Tommy’s nephew, well-known retired teacher Tommy Francis in Falcarragh, and the Raphoe Disocesen Archive.
This footage perfectly captures not only the building process but the people who made this concept a reality and the many people that passed by as the building work took place.
The film delves into the unique process taken to help fund the chapel project at a time when rural Ireland was greatly impoverished.
During his career, Liam McCormick designed some 27 new churches and church reconstructions throughout Ireland and England and locally these included St Peter’s Catholic Church in Milford as well as the iconic Burt Chapel, which is based on the nearby historic landmark of An Grianan Fort. This series of impressive churches is testimony to his position as the most accomplished Irish architect of his generation as well as the leading patron of modern Irish church art.
McCormick also embraced a wide variety of building types including schools to social housing and private dwellings, including the home of his great friend and Nobel prize winning peace builder, John Hume in Inishowen.
Other works included the iconic Met Éireann building in Glasnevin, Dublin.
The new film was written and Directed by myself here in Creeslough and was funded by Creative Ireland in conjunction with Donegal County Council and the The Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media.
There was a mix of good fortune and good timing in how the film came to fruition.
We had worked on a number of other local history project in the past, including ‘Glass Mountain: The Story of Muckish Sand’, ‘High Cross’ and our recent tribute film to computing pioneer, Kay McNulty from Feymore, but we hadn’t done anything on a bigger scale for a while. The opportunity to do something on St Michael’s church was always a story just waiting to be told, especially on the year of its 50th anniversary, but it wasn’t until we were shown the archive footage Canon Doherty filmed of the building work that we really knew we had the making of good film as we knew there were people locally who would have a great insight to the time, either directly or indirectly, and this was something we thought we could develop. Then came an opportunity of some funding to help the project from Creative Ireland, so this allowed us to get the film made over the summer months.
We would sincerely like to thank all who helped in the project and hope to be in a position to host a number of local screenings in the locality before the film is uploaded on YouTube to share with everyone.