28 Media Representations of Nature and Suicide in Irish Film A Reading of Disco Pigs, On the Edge and Garage Pat Brereton © REA: A Journal of Religion, Education and the Arts, Issue 8, 2011, http://rea.materdei.ie/ Overview In this paper I wish to frame some of the social and theoretical debates around the high rate of suicide in Ireland through the prism of fictional representations in a number of recent Irish films. The ‘death instinct’ is often framed around a romantic articulation of alienation and otherness in the arts, which in turn is often co-opted for dramatic effect in foregrounding a number of cautionary social problems including suicide. From an initial content analysis of Irish cinema we can uncover clear evidence of various manifestations of mental and depression-based disabilities 1 , which are frequently associated with social deprivation and often privilege the perennial ‘village fool’ archetype. Furthermore, numerous examples of familial dysfunctionality, resulting in various forms of psychological disintegration are called upon in classics like Ryan’s Daughter, The Butcher Boy, Into the West, The Field, How Harry Became a Tree, Adam and Paul , The Magdalene Sisters, as well as the films examined in this paper. I will also explore how such an evocation of an unstable human agency is further mediated through representations of nature, which effectively dramatises the pain and loneliness of mental illness and depression. Frequently, specific evocations of landscape and nature serve to counterpoint the mental state of the protagonists, like the dysfunctional young teenagers in Disco Pigs, who make a poetic connection between the radiance of the blue sky and their romantic love, announcing as they look up into the stratosphere that ‘the colour of love is blue’. Meanwhile the middle aged and apparently simple-minded Josie character in Garage cannot deal with his own