Peace dividend: film and politics side-by-side at Stormont. Photograph: John Harrison/PA
In early November a group of armed and masked men ran across a Belfast street and stormed into a local bar. The gang did so under arc lights and in full view of a gathering crowd. To those unaware of what was actually going on in, it might have seemed that the dark days of the Troubles were about to return.
The incident, however, was merely a recreation of a real life-and-death scenario that frequently occurred during the conflict just past - the action part of a new movie based on a best-selling memoir of an IRA informer.
Martin McGartland is a street-wise wide boy from west Belfast who infiltrated the Provisional IRA on behalf of RUC Special Branch. Physically robust and extremely cunning, McGartland thwarted a number of important IRA operations in the city in the early 1990s, as well leaving sophisticated bugging devices inside secret arms hides across the city. His strength stood him in good stead: he jumped from a two-storey house where he was being held by the IRA's internal security squad awaiting torture and eventual death after being unmasked as a traitor. Later, while in exile in northeast England, McGartland fought two IRA gunmen dispatched from Ireland to shoot him dead.
McGartland's story was retold in his Fifty Dead Men Walking, which sold almost 150,000 copies around the world. Now his tale of life as an informer inside the IRA is being portrayed on film with Academy award winner Ben Kingsley playing the part of his RUC handler. The locations for the movie range from a house on the Co Down coast at Ardglass, chosen because it still has authentic 1970s wallpaper, to the warren of streets that lie at the northern end of Belfast known as Ardoyne, a republican enclave surrounded by the loyalist Greater Shankill.
The McGartland movie isn't the only film that has been shot in Northern Ireland over the last 12 months. This week Sir Richard Attenborough, Hollywood veteran star Shirley MacLaine and a host of new rising British and Irish actors attended the premier of Closing the Ring, a second world war love story set in Belfast. Prior to the unveiling of the film on Thursday, Sir Richard attended a reception at the Stormont Assembly in Belfast where he met the devolved government's culture minister, Edwin Poots. Inside Stormont's ornate Great Hall Sir Richard lavished praised on the renaissance of Northern Ireland's film industry and recommended the province as a good place for filmmakers to do business.
Northern Ireland, particularly its stories of conflict, division and terrorism, still provides writers and directors with a rich seam of material. Paul Greengrass and Jimmy McGovern offered two television dramas depicting the tragic events of Bloody Sunday, 1972. The BBC produced the critically acclaimed Holy Cross about the loyalist siege of a Catholic girls primary school. And at present a UK television production company has been commissioned to write and produce a film on the Robert McCartney murder and the impact of his sisters' fight for justice in the face of IRA intimidation and both British and Irish government indifference. There are also rumours of another TV drama about collusion between RUC officers and a UVF gang in north Belfast.
It appears that one of the spin-offs of the peace process and the historic compromise between Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness has been the creation of an atmosphere attractive to producers and directors from Britain and far beyond. The real challenge, though, will be if an indigenous film industry headed up by local directors, producers and writers can follow the current wave of illustrious imports who have suddenly made what was once - in Metropolitan eyes - a dangerous backwater into the most attractive and creative location to shoot films in these islands.
