MacCarthy's Bar

Produced by Bob Jackson and directed by Gary Lennon, 'A Doctor's Sword' tells the remarkable story of Aidan MacCarthy, trained as a doctor at University College Cork (UCC), who survived some of the most harrowing episodes of the Second World War, and his daughters' quest to unlock the secret of a Japanese ceremonial sword their father brought home from the war, and which is kept at MacCarthy's Bar in Castletownbere.

    It turned out that Aidan received the sword as a gift from the commandant of a Nagasaki prison camp, Second Lieutenant Isao Kusuno, whom Aidan saved from a lynching by prisoners after the A-bomb was dropped in August, 1945.

     'A Doctor's Sword', as well as telling of Aidan's courage and resilience during the war, including more than three years as a Japanese prisoner of war, follows Niki MacCarthy to Japan in a search for Kusuno's family and the true meaning behind the gift of the ancestral sword, or katana.

    The documentary was nominated in the IFTA (Irish Film and Television Academy) awards in 2016. It has had special screenings at UCC, at Clongowes Wood College, Co Kildare, where Aidan MacCarthy was a pupil, and in Castletownbere.

     Summer 2016 saw publication of Bob Jackson's book, 'A Doctor's Sword' (see News pages).