Before the advent of television, the only form of moving-image news available to the general public was the cinema newsreel. Given the lack of a sustained newsreel industry in Ireland, Irish audiences were mostly catered for by British companies, meaning that they often watched news that had imperial connotations or was at odds with viewers’ lived experiences of the events depicted. The newsreels sold the Anglo-Irish Treaty as a welcome resolution to Irish conflict, sanitised the misdemeanours of the Black and Tans and failed to report on major events like Bloody Sunday during the War of Independence. They also adopted a ‘partitionist’ mentality, representing two Irelands (north and south) with very different associations and values. In many ways, the stereotypes associated with newsreel coverage of Irish politics a century ago still exist in news on a variety of platforms today. In this lecture for the GAA museum’s Bloody Sunday commemorative lecture series, Ciara Chambers considers how the major stories of the 1910s and 1920s depicted Irish politics. The lecture includes material from the IFI Irish Film Archive’s Irish Independence Film Collection and also explains how images from the Irish revolutionary period were to inspire anti-British German propaganda during the Second World War.