John Michael McDonagh wrote the script at his parents' house in An Spidéal, over a Christmas, with particular roads and piers already chosen. Eleven months later the unit was shooting in them. Sergeant Boyle's district and the production's district are the same ground. That is rare, and it means almost nothing here stands in for anywhere else.
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places on the route
Connemara and County Wicklow, about 220 km apart — switch with the buttons above. Click a point to jump to its entry.
There is one. The pier where Boyle walks into the gunfire is 220 km away, on the other coast.
Principal photography began on 29 October 2009 and ran six weeks, in weather McDonagh reckoned was the worst in three hundred years. His account is that they got away with it: outside when it stopped raining, inside when it bucketed down. One scene was beaten by horizontal rain in Connemara and had to be finished in Wicklow, on the other side of the country.
Eighteen kilometres west of Galway on the R336, with the bay on your left the whole way. Shooting started here. McDonagh's parents moved back from London to live in the village and he is in it several times a year, so the locations went into the script before anyone went looking for them.
Everett's running problem in the film is that nobody will speak English to him. The joke has a legal footing. Under the Placenames (Ceantair Ghaeltachta) Order 2004 the English forms of Gaeltacht placenames lost their standing, and signs in the district carry Irish only: the signpost in the village points to Maigh Cuilinn, Uachtar Ard and Casla and offers no translation. At the 2022 census about three quarters of the people here were Irish speakers, and about 40 per cent of those used the language daily outside school. The village name itself is a borrowing: An Spidéal means the hospital, after a mediaeval leper house that stood at the western end.
The village has a quay, a beach, a craft village and the ruin of an early Christian chapel, Cill Éinde, above the old harbour. All of it is public and the quay is about six hundred metres below the main street.
The pier at the end of the village is the pier the finale was written for. It never got the finale.
Ros na Rún, the Irish-language soap on TG4, has been made here since November 1996 and is past two thousand episodes. Its village is fictional and sits next door to the real one.
The production named three areas when it announced itself, and this was one of them: Connemara, Spiddal and Barna. About seven kilometres west of Galway city, 2,336 people at the last count, and inside the Gaeltacht, which is why its official name is Bearna in English as well as in Irish. The old part runs down to a small harbour with a quay that faces straight up Galway Bay.
Two of the islands in the chain that hangs off the R374 west of Casla, joined to the mainland and to each other by causeways. Together with Garmna they are Ceantar na nOileáin, the district of the islands, and this is where the McDonagh family comes from. The brothers spent childhood holidays here.
Leitir Mealláin is the far end of the road: 214 people in 2022, low granite, sea inlets that fill and empty across weed and rock, a shop, a church and a signal tower on the neighbouring islet. Leitir Móir is bigger at 542 and sits closer in, with a hill of 117 metres in the middle of it and houses along the sheltered northern shore.
Eight years later Tomás Ó Súilleabháin brought Arracht to Leitir Mealláin, a famine story in Irish that uses the same rock and water for something with no jokes in it at all.
Boyle's afternoon with the two women from Dublin was shot here, along with several other scenes. It is the glass-fronted hotel on Lough Atalia, opened in November 2005, with the milliner Philip Treacy, a Galway man, as design director. The contrast with the rest of the film is the point of using it.
The film came back in July 2011 for its Irish premiere at the Eye Cinema during the Galway Film Fleadh, with the party afterwards in the hotel and a red carpet laid between the two.
The unit was based at the studio at An Tullach, on the coast road between An Spidéal and Casla, rather than in Galway city. Producer Ed Guiney's verdict on Galway was that it has its own small film industry and is used to having crews around. It is a working facility, not a visitor site.
County Wicklow
Wicklow Harbour
The south quay — the shoot-out was moved here from Connemara
The gunfight on the pier took six days here, some of it at night with the quay lit by spotlights and blanks going off over the water.
The sequence was written for An Spidéal. Guiney's reason for moving it was practical: electricians, special effects, armoury and stunts all at once, in a village that could not take them without the scene losing what McDonagh wanted from it. One night went to rain, the county rescheduled it, and the actors came back.
What you get instead is a working commercial port. Timber comes in and stacks up on the quay beside the sheds, trawlers tie up along the south quay in the middle of town, and two long piers close the harbour mouth. A town of 12,957 people bends round the water in a half circle.
The county lists the castle alongside the harbour among the film's locations, without saying what was shot there.
It is worth the five hundred metres anyway. Wicklow went to Maurice FitzGerald after the Norman invasion, and he put up a fortification facing the land, on the rock immediately south of the harbour mouth. What is left is two broken stumps of wall on a promontory with the Irish Sea on three sides.
The ruin works hard for the county film office. Pierce Brosnan's Taffin used it in 1988. Reign of Fire turned the ruin and the ground around it into a graveyard in 2002. And for six seasons of Vikings, longships were a normal sight on this coast between the Black Castle and Brittas Bay.
