Sinéad Keenan recalls her childhood Christmases in Dublin with vivid detail. The festivities began “at the crack of dawn on Christmas Eve”, when she and her siblings – Gráinne and Rory Keenan (now also actors) – piled bleary-eyed into the family car in Dublin, and set off to start the run of events with a fry-up at Bewley’s Café. They’d watch the RTÉ Radio 1 Christmas Eve Show from Grafton Street with Gay Byrne, meet family friends for drinks at either the Westbury Hotel or Davy Byrnes, and then head home to get to bed early. “As a kid, it’s the one night of the year you’re dying to sleep early, because the big fella was arriving,” she recalls with a wistful smile.
“On Christmas Day, we’d get up to see if we got anything, then we’d put on our good Christmas clothes and go to Mass – but of course we’d just be dying to go home to play with whatever we got.
“My mum is from Belfast, so my nana and papa would come down from Belfast, and we’d have the Great Big Christmas Dinner. The following day, my mum would have all her side over, so that was another big meal, with 16 or 17 of us.”
The festivities don’t stop there: December 27th is Keenan’s birthday, though “by the time the 27th rolls around, people have overdosed on cheese, wine and food, and there’s a feeling of ‘Oh dear, do we have to do this again?’.”
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Instead, she now treats Mother’s Day as her special day, spending it with her husband, TV and commercial director Chris McGill (who got into the Christmas spirit early this year as director of the EastEnders festive specials), and two sons (aged 10 and eight).
The family are based in Stratford-upon-Avon – Keenan moved to the UK after leaving Fair City in 2003 to see what it had to offer – but usually return to Ireland to continue tradition as much as possible. This year they’re staying in the UK for a change “but we’ll go over the weekend before, so we’ll get our Irish Christmas,” Keenan says.
This season of gift-giving is a chance to splash out on her boys, but Keenan is also keen to not spoil them. “When they were born, we said we’d have a one-in, one-out rule with toys, but that didn’t work. Now, we get them involved in choosing what to give away, and Christmas is a good opportunity to teach them they’re bloody lucky.”
The festive break will be a much-needed one for Keenan, having spent three months this year filming the newest series of Unforgotten, the Bafta-winning detective drama in which she pairs alongside Sanjeev Bhaskar to find the truth behind long-standing grisly cases. Before that, she spent an “intense but brilliant” six months on How to Get to Heaven from Belfast, the newest output from the team behind Derry Girls including writer Lisa McGee.
In the upcoming Netflix series she stars alongside Caoilfhionn Dunne (Love/Hate, Industry) and Roisin Gallagher (The Lovers, The Dry), as tight-knit friends who embark on an adventure across Ireland to piece together the truth of the past when the fourth member of their friendship group dies.
It’s Keenan’s fourth time bringing Lisa McGee’s work to life: they worked on flat share horror-comedy Being Human, London Irish (McGee’s first foray into sitcoms), and the critical and commercial triumph Derry Girls.
Keenan says there are parallels with Derry Girls: “There’s that Northern humour and comedy. The three women were in school together, and there are flashbacks to that time,” she says.
“They’re very much like three sisters – there’s no walking on eggshells, no airs and graces,” Keenan says of the protagonists. “They know exactly the chinks in each other’s armour, and where to place that spear, but they would die for each other. My closest friends are still from secondary school, and those formative years create bonds that are absolutely precious. You rarely see that dynamic with women, particularly older women, in a road trip situation.”
How to Get to Heaven from Belfast is due to air in February 2026, by which time Keenan will be well into filming the seventh series of Unforgotten. “This series is loosely based on people who were involved in the British care system in their younger years. It’s eye-opening and not pretty.”
This will be Keenan’s third reprise of DCI Jessie James (yes, like the outlaw), though she’s aware that acting can rarely provide job security. “Even when I signed up with Unforgotten, I was contracted for two series, but that doesn’t actually mean I’d get to do them,” she says. “But that’s the nature of the beast. If you go into this ridiculous profession, you’re never settled or comfortable. Every time I finish a job, I think that could be it, I could never work again.”
It makes it hard to have a career plan, especially as “you’re at the mercy of so many other people’s decisions and variables. And women after a certain age can fall off a cliff in this industry, though it’s getting better: we’re gently stepping off the cliff now rather than falling.
“I’d just like to keep at it,” she says, looking to the future. “If I’m lucky enough to be asked to put myself up for good stories and good scripts, I’ll be very happy.”
