Maurice Fitzpatrick is a film director and lecturer from Ireland who was educated in Trinity College Dublin. He lived in Japan 2004-11.

He has made two documentary films for the BBC: The Boys of St. Columb’s (also an RTÉ production) which tells the story of the first generation of children to receive free secondary education as a result of the ground-breaking 1947 Education Act in Northern Ireland, whose participants included St. Columbs’ Nobelists John Hume and Seamus Heaney; and a second film for the BBC, an examination of Brian Friel’s play, Translations which shows how Translations came to spearhead a cultural movement in both Northern and Southern Ireland to achieve a measure of cultural pluralism in advance of a political settlement.

In 2017, he wrote, directed and produced a documentary feature film, In the Name of Peace: John Hume in America, which is a feature documentary which includes interviews with President Bill Clinton, President Jimmy Carter, many US Senators and Congressmen, as well as Irish leaders and British Prime Ministers Tony Blair and John Major. Inspired by Martin Luther King, rising from the riot-torn streets of Northern Ireland to enlist American Presidents from Carter to Clinton, this is the story of the extraordinary work of Nobel Prize-winner John Hume to harness and leverage US support to help to secure peace in Ireland. Narrated by Liam Neeson and scored by Bill Whelan, the film chronicles John Hume’s approach to politics in Northern Ireland in co-ordination with senior political figures in the US.  John Hume in America has been has been welcomed by Thomas O Neill, former Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts, as ‘the most succinct narrative on the history of Northern Ireland spanning from Bloody Sunday to the Good Friday Agreement’. The film has screened at over twenty film festivals and at four parliaments.

He is also the author of a book entitled John Hume in America (Irish Academic Press. 2017; University of Notre Dame Press 2019), launched by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. He is Poynter Fellow at Yale University.

(EFACIS)