Spurred by the success of its film department, Dún Laoghaire Institute hasdecided on a grand renaming, writes Donald Clarke

Earlier this year, Hugh Linehan remarked in these pages that, unlike most European countries, Ireland did not have a national film school. It does now.

Tomorrow morning at the Irish Film Institute, Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design & Technology will celebrate the renaming of its film department as the National Film School. The event marks the culmination of a successful 20 years for the programme, which was set up as a response to the increasing use of film by the college's fine-art students.

Among the pioneers was Aisling Walsh, whose recent feature film, Song For A Raggy Boy, has been winning prizes all over the world. Speaking from Slovenia, she explains how, as a student at Dún Laoghaire in the late 1970s, she broke new ground by deciding to work in film.

"Because there was no separate film category, I had to do fine art," she says. "But when it came to my final assessment they had to get a film professional in to assess me, because nobody there had the specialist knowledge. Then film became part of the graphics course and, eventually, a separate diploma."

(This year, in keeping with the film school's increased status, the three-year diploma will be replaced by a four-year degree.)

Walsh praises the art school's then head, Trevor Scott, for his openness to an unfamiliar medium. This, she explains, was a very different era. During her time at Dún Laoghaire, a film-appreciation course had to be cancelled because of outside objections to the screening of "dangerous, foreign material".

The responsibility for formalising the first course, however, fell on Róisín Hogan, then principal and later director of the institute. Hogan, who now runs the Fire Station arts centre in Dublin, explains how in the early days they had just one film camera and a couple of lights. "The industry leant us a great deal of equipment, and RTÉ, where we did all the processing, were also enormously helpful."

In its first years, the school seems to have encouraged an experimental approach. There was less focus on educating people for jobs in particular sections of the business than is now the case. "But then the industry was so very small," says Hogan. "There was just the odd production now and then. And at the time there was no history of a film school. Many people in the industry would have thought that you learned by starting out as a clapper loader and working your way up."

By the late 1980s, when it became clear that the school, whose graduates include Kieron J. Walsh and Kirsten Sheridan, was gaining a significant reputation, Hogan and her colleagues made it their business to ensure the course attracted a wide range of budding professionals. Editors, costume designers, production designers and sound technicians all studied together, forming relationships that would be useful later in their careers.

The director Conor McMahon, who graduated from Dún Laoghaire in 2001, says he is using much the same crew on his début feature, Dead Meat, that he used for his brilliantly disgusting graduation film, Brain Eater.

So has the school changed from a centre for uninhibited exploration to a vocational institution? Does Dún Laoghaire just give the industry what it requires? The current head of the film department (and, from tomorrow, of the National Film School), Donald Taylor Black, baulks at the suggestion. "No, no. It's not as if we are an IT college that just does what Microsoft tells us. We obviously listen. But if they said, 'scrap the director's course, we are just going to use American directors,' then that wouldn't happen."

To facilitate communication with the industry and to help formulate general strategy, Taylor Black has put together an advisory board featuring such luminaries as John Boorman, Neil Jordan and Roddy Doyle. All were impressed by the notion of establishing a national film school. But what does that title actually mean? One assumes that, as with a national theatre, such a body is putting itself forward as an ornament of the state. "Well, yes, and we think we can be that," says Taylor Black.

But does the renaming imply some recognition from the Government or the Department of Education and Science that this is the national film school? "We have spoken to the Government, of course," he says. "And we have spoken to the industry. We asked the advisory board, and none of them said: 'Who do you think you are?' None of them said they wouldn't do it until they saw a letter from the Government."