One of the most bizarre moments during the chaos of May 1968 in Paris was the sight of French students in the Sorbonne brawling as they watched a film about Ireland.
Why they should fight over a film which savagely criticised the narrowness of Irish cultural and religious life in the 1960s while their main preoccupation was rebelling against the narrowness of French life under General de Gaulle was not clear to me, nor to Peter Lennon, who had made the film.
Peter, who was a freelance journalist in Paris working mainly for the Guardian, had shot Rocky Road to Dublin in a hectic 16 days on a shoestring budget of £20,000, using one of France's best cameramen, Raoul Coutard. It was built around interviews with well-known figures such as Conor Cruise O'Brien, Sean O'Faolain,
Prof Liam Ó Briain of the Film Censorship Board, film-maker John Huston and theatre director Jim Fitzgerald.
There were also interviews with students and with a young wife who told how her confessor advised her to "go and dig the garden" when she tried to discuss her problems with artificial contraception. Fr Michael Cleary, the singing curate, also starred, giving a rendition of The Chatanooga Shoeshine Boys to a bemused patient in a hospital.
Lennon had got the film entered in the film critics' section of that year's Cannes Film Festival. It was one of only eight entries chosen by international film critics; but immediately after the screening, the prestigious directors Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and Claude Lelouch arrived in the cinema and announced that the festival was being closed down in solidarity with the students on the barricades in Paris. But students in nearby Nice university immediately set up a distribution network of "revolutionary" films and insisted that it include Rocky Road to Dublin.
Trains and planes were also shut down so Lennon returned in a freezing bus to a Paris smelling of tear-gas and with the streets of the Latin Quarter barricaded with burned-out cars and cobblestones. (One of the first things the government did after order was restored was to asphalt over the pavements which had supplied such deadly ammunition to the students.)
I was reporting on the riots for the Guardian and Sunday Telegraph, so I welcomed the chance to see how the students would react to Lennon's film when it was shown in the law faculty of the Sorbonne. The striking Renault workers also requested a screening.
The main point Lennon was trying to make in the film was that Ireland's own revolution, led by poets and socialists over 50 years earlier, had been hijacked by narrow-minded politicians, clerics and censors. I recall feeling ashamed as the film listed the names of writers who had been banned in Ireland to the background of a bell tolling. How could you feel otherwise when the list included some of the best French writers?
Following Cannes, the prestigious Cahiers du Cinema had praised the film but it was not to go down so well in Ireland. Alf MacLochlainn of the Irish Film Society wrote that Lennon was among "the sincere guys who make bad films" and that this might be classed as "for the blind".
Lennon was infuriated when the Irish Press, whose new editor, Tim Pat Coogan, was a good friend, sent a reporter who began by saying: "Sorry, I haven't seen your film, Peter. The news editor got me out of bed to do this." Worse was to come when the article appeared. "Poor Peter," the reporter wrote. "For him all is blackness here, from birth to grave. He fears he is wandering through a dark, dismal, chilling tunnel, groping through a tunnel of no love, with no contraceptives, no real freedom. Married with two children, he professes no religion." The bit about no religion was "the rabbit punch", Lennon recalls ruefully.
Tim Pat Coogan himself was embarrassed by the piece and as I had recently returned from Paris to become Foreign Editor of the Irish Press, he asked me to interview Peter - as a way of making amends, I suppose. In my interview Lennon described the film as "trying to make sense of the community which produced me". His main fear was that it might be banned so he had tried to get it discussed as much as possible before release. Yet he commented that Liam Ó Briain, of the censorship appeals board, who should have been "the villain of the piece", came over as a warm personality and to such effect that the interview was split to allow the censor to sum up the film.
Now, 37 years later, the film is to be relaunched in Dublin next Monday at the Irish Film Institute. It will be shown at 5pm and 8.45pm for most of the week along with a short film by Paul Duane about the making of Rocky Road to Dublin. This will include footage shot in Cannes by Belgian television of Lennon being snarled at by Jean-Luc Godard.
In 1968, Lennon angered many in Ireland by his bleak portrait of the country from which he and many thousands more emigrated. For members of a younger generation this will be an opportunity to pass their own judgment.