For the academic year 2003 to 2004, I took on an MA course I had been hoping to do for some time, a course in Film Studies with a range of modules I hoped could add to my potential as a screenwriter and director. It suited me best to choose the course at University College Dublin, where the campus was close to home, and I had already met one my potential lecturers, Ruth Barton. I hoped too that the UCD connection might help the possibility of hooking into one of Ireland’s film production companies.

While the course proved to be most interesting, and I graduated successfully, I did not get out of it as much as I had hoped.

A factor in this disappointment was my not knowing until well into the course that I was increasingly unwell. I knew that Anne had been concerned that I was losing weight and getting very fatigued, but our GP had signalled no particular alarm. Little did I know that some of the irascibility that I displayed during the course, and the fact that I felt too tired to take on the weekend production modules, was due to my thyroid gland becoming seriously overactive.

It was my cardiologist who spotted this immediately, on the occasion of one of my routine visits, and he put in train urgent treatment by a colleague endocrinologist. Once diagnosed, this type of thyroid problem is easily treated and can be reversed quite quickly. The likelihood is that I had been hit by one of the known side effects of a common heart medication I had been on since the early days of my treatment for atrial fibrillation in Brussels.

Most of the twenty or so participants in the film course were in their twenties or thirties, a number of them coming from America. We all got along very well, but it soon seemed clear to me that the possibilities of any of them really getting off the ground as filmmakers, in a context where I might find a place in a crew, were virtually zero.

Shortly after graduation I wrote to two film companies I selected from a trade directory as doing work that could be of interest to me and would be easily accessible. I was delighted to have friendly interviews with each.

The first asked if I could work helping to identify contract possibilities in media projects supported by the EU. I was glad to be asked, but it was not what I had in mind. The second, within walking distance of our house, turned out to be Esras, a company producing first-class documentary and current affairs material within my area of interest and, most encouragingly, offering to look at film treatments I might put to them in the context of calls for funding submissions from organisations like RTÉ and Filmbase.

Esras was as good as its word and submitted two of my projects to RTÉ and a third to a joint Filmbase/Arts Council scheme. They seemed as disappointed as I was that none of these projects made it to a second stage of scrutiny within the call process but assured me that this was the fate of nine out of ten submissions made by production companies.

The ideas that failed to make the grade were a “townlands” essay piece on Michael O’Flanagan’s Kilmainham, a series on Irish archives that had the backing of the Association of Irish Archivists, and a mock confrontation of the Royal Hibernian Academy’s drive to revive the teaching of classic techniques in its new schools, with current practice in the National College of Art and Design.

I enlisted the support of two fellow graduates from my UCD class to make a submission to Filmbase for a further documentary project. This proposed to survey the rapidly changing profiles of Dublin’s Liffey quays using novel filming techniques in both black and white and colour. It again got nowhere.

Although I have a couple of unfinished film projects filed in bits and pieces around my study, my realistic assessment is that my image of myself standing in the midst of a busy film crew with my viewer hanging from my neck is now total fantasy.

Read more: 2005 – My Study Project