When Eileen Walsh was a young girl in 1980s Cork, her family had very little money but “an awful lot of love”. Her mother raised the six children and her father delivered coal in the city, which was also home to Bessborough, a church-run institution for mothers and babies. It was one of the largest of its kind in Ireland; more than 900 infants died there.
“Growing up, life was all very education focused and very religious,” she says over video call from Dublin. “We did the rosary every night. It sounds so old-fashioned now.” Walsh could just as well be describing the family from her new film, Small Things Like These, based on the tiny but powerful 2021 Claire Keegan novel and set in County Wexford in 1985. At once so quiet and blazing with rage, it stars Cillian Murphy as a coal merchant, Bill Furlong, and Walsh as his stay-at-home wife, Eileen. The couple and their daughters are trying to keep their heads down and get by, living just streets away from an imposing mother and baby home run by nuns. “I know the story of Small Things deep down in my bones,” says Walsh.
