The years between 1916 and 1918 were a key period in the integration of cinema into Irish society. In the early 1910s, speculative capitalists from city to village level, taking advantage of the growing international trade in moving-picture entertainment, had produced a building boom in the construction of picture houses. These new entertainment venues appeared not only on the streetscape of cities and large towns, where theatres and other entertainment venues had always been located, but also in suburbs, small towns and villages, where professional entertainment had never before been offered on a regular basis. With that substantial infrastructure in place, the later-war and post-Rising years were particularly notable for the various struggles to use and control it. Before the war, governments, political parties, the churches and other dominant social institutions had mostly ignored cinema or had tried to suppress what they initially saw as a pernicious working-class fad. During the war, however, powerful interests began to recognize cinema’s value. As the cinema boom grew on the back of increasing middle-class interest in the business opportunity and in film as a new form of entertainment, cinema was taken more seriously.