more movies like this?

Patrick Delaney is based on the author of the orginal book (not the screenplay), of which SFARB is the middle of a trilogy called Song for a Poor Boy, SFARB and Song for a Fly Boy (I think) called Patrick Galvin who survived the reform school and did indeed become a writer, first a journalist and then a writer of novels and plays. The Liam Mercier character is the other half of the same young man, when it's described how Liam used to steal books, that is what happened to Patrick, whose upbringing in Cork was very neglected/alternative. He points out that the system put in place by the church to protect the poor and disadvantaged became perverted against the very young people it should have been striving to help. It nearly made him into a master criminal, but instead his love of reading managed to civilise him to the point where he became a brilliant writer. The end cards are brilliant fictions by the film's director Aisling Walsh really, Franklin dead in a war, Mercier buried at St. Jude's (the fictionalised version of the Reform School), the brutal priest in the African missions and the paidophile priest still alive and living in America today. But they carry your thoughts through beyond and after a film that has been genuinely BASED on a true story, Patrick Galvin's own early life.


Patrick is an agent, casting director, producer and actor with his own company in Northern Ireland.