A man in a bar with a flat cap, bloodied knuckles and a dreamy look lays down his whiskey and writes a letter. “Dear Erin,” he begins, and a soundtrack of fiddles swells as he yearns for his lost love in the distant land of America.
The trailer for the upcoming film – tagline: “she was the Irish goodbye he never forgot” – ran in recent weeks in cinemas and online and was accompanied by a poster showing green mountains, shamrocks and a rainbow.
For many, it was Hollywood’s latest affront to Ireland. “What did we Irish people ever do to you to deserve this?” said one social media post. “Christ could they not find a leprechaun to complete cliche bingo,” said another. Some sought solace in sarcasm: “I think they nailed it. I’m always in the pub in the 1910s writing love letters to American girls with my big dirty fingernails. Finally I feel seen.”
Last week came the twist: Epic, the Irish emigration museum in Dublin, revealed it had made the trailer and that the film, titled Dear Erin, did not exist. The trailer was a stunt to lampoon the stereotyping of Ireland in Hollywood romcoms such as Wild Mountain Thyme, Irish Wish, Leap Year and PS I Love You.
“It was time to call it out,” the museum said in a statement. “We created a trailer for a film that we hope never gets made, and filled it with all of the tired, cliched portrayals of Irish people often seen in Hollywood movies.”
Colonial-era stereotypes of the Irish as fist-fighting drunks or hopeless romantics persisted in contemporary films, warping perceptions of a complex, multilayered society, Aileesh Carew, the museum’s director and chief executive, said in an interview. “If you don’t know anyone from Ireland then these films may be your only reference point.”
The trailer features the actor Peter Coonan sporting shamrocks on his lapel and surrounded by empty beer glasses as his voiceover reminisces about meeting Erin: “I have played that night over in my head more times than the Finnegans fought the O’Malleys.”
The goal was to mimic a studio publicity campaign while cramming in every conceivable cliche, said Carew, adding: “Potatoes, we forgot the potatoes.”
Hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok and LadBible, along with the response on Instagram, Reddit and other platforms, showed the campaign had hit a chord, said Carew.
Before the reveal, some commenters guessed that the trailer was a spoof, while others begged that it be so. “Must be a joke here somewhere,” said one. “Sweet Jesus no please. This should be called Dear God No! not Dear Erin.”
The Hollywood stereotypes dated from the 1930s when gangster films featured Irish characters who were menacing thugs or comic relief drunks, but invariably seedy, said Dr Sian Barber, a film studies lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast. “Irishness was something foreign but also comforting. It was not done with any malice but it quickly became embedded in Hollywood consciousness.”
Irish people, and tourism authorities, at times colluded in this romanticisation, said Barber. “It offers this beautiful image of unreality which is welcoming and friendly. It’s playing to this tourist idea of what Ireland can offer – the landscape, the loveable rogue.”
John Ford’s 1952 film The Quiet Man set a template of sorts by sending John Wayne’s character back to his homeland to find a wife, whom he ends up dragging through fields, but its rural setting reflected much of Irish life at that time, unlike more recent fare that suggests society still revolves around sheep, donkeys and Guinness.
Irish critics howled – in mirth and agony – at the whimsy and dodgy accents in the likes of Wild Mountain Thyme, a 2020 romcom starring Jamie Dornan and Emily Blunt, and Irish Wish, a 2024 vehicle for Lindsay Lohan.
The main problem was not inaccuracy but lack of context, said Paudie Holly, a storyteller at Dublin’s National Leprechaun Museum. Folklore can and should be celebrated, and there was no reason to feel shame about Ireland’s rural past, but modern Ireland was different, he said. “It’s ridiculous to suggest our culture has been frozen in place for a hundred years.”
Lance Daly, the Dublin-based director of Black 47, said Ireland had aggravated the phenomenon by luring foreign productions for the jobs they would bring rather than the stories they would tell. “What you have then is a director who is not Irish directing actors who are not Irish … We have a weird tolerance for it. We have to be careful that we’re not sponsoring foreign film-makers to make fools of us.”
