I grew up in Raheen in Tallaght. It was a lot of fun. Everyone was a young family, because it was a new housing estate. There was a ubiquitousness of kids. My mum and dad would have been quite theatre-literate. Before I was born, they would have gone to the theatre a lot, and [when I was young], my mum brought me. We saw Blood Brothers in the Olympia, things like that. Being brought to the theatre in Busáras, in the basement – those kinds of experiences were formative.
My parents brought me to drama classes. A lady teaching them said you’d be better off going to a place called Dublin Youth Theatre. I went, and it was really great. They had to take in two kids from every area, so it was as diverse as Dublin could be in the 1990s. I met a lot of people who became future collaborators, like Philip McMahon.
What’s funny about acting is you can often do things that you think are going to be bigger than they are. I remember getting a TV series, 21 years ago, called The Big Bow Wow. It was the big thing for RTÉ, there was so much hype about it. I got a decent part. I was very young – it was one of the first things I’d ever done. I thought, this might be good. It had so much money spent on it. It came out. Nobody watched it. It just disappeared. It was the first time I figured out that you can do something that people spend so much time on, so much work and effort goes into it, and nobody will ever see it.
Career-wise, becoming a playwright gave me the most focus and artistic satisfaction – the creation of my own work, producing my own things, being in them sometimes. Towards the end of the 2000s, I [co-wrote and starred in] a TV show called Sarah and Steve. I felt really proud of the fact that it had been conceived and written and performed all by ourselves.
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The Basic Income for Artists is coming to an end in February. They’ve said they’re going to replace it with something, but I have a feeling, like a lot of things, that it’s going to be allowed to dissipate. Obviously, a cost-of-living crisis is incredibly hard in any profession. But if you’re in a profession that doesn’t pay a living wage year-round… a lot of artists will get timed out. Female artists, especially, if they want to have a family, are kind of expected to stop doing what they do. There’s a real upsurge of art and creativity from Irish artists, and that’s recognised both locally and globally. But without that constant support, it can tend to go into deep freeze.
There’s always been an obsession with Ireland [in my work] – the culture and the class; the things that separate us, and that bind us; community and family. They say, ‘Write what you know’. I always felt there was a lack of reality to the expression of working-class life in mainstream representations. When I was writing Sarah and Steve, we purposely veered away from writing something stereotypical, to writing something about the way people actually are in those working-class communities.
[ Emmet Kirwan: On My Culture RadarOpens in new window ]
Everything I make, first and foremost, has to have an ability to entertain an audience. If people are to come to a show, you owe them a good time. But often with my work there is a preoccupation with the injustices that affect people who don’t have power, because they’re the ones that wind up paying for the excesses of governments, or corporations, or developers.
I’m the ambassador for Focus Ireland’s No Child Without a Home campaign this Christmas. There are more than 5,000 children who will be homeless going into Christmas. Many of these have been in emergency accommodation since Covid. There are children currently living in the State who have grown up their entire lives in emergency accommodation. All renters in the State currently face the risk of homelessness, even people who are earning a decent wage. The great tragedy coming into this Christmas is that there’s that many children homeless and if it’s not [addressed], next year there will be more.
I’m currently starring in A Christmas Carol, at the Gate Theatre. In the version we’re doing [adapted by Neil Bartlett and directed by Claire O’Reilly], everyone’s keeping their own accent. It’s London, but it’s kind of, maybe, Dublin.
Speaking of Focus Ireland, Dublin does actually kind of mirror Victorian London. [It seems like a significant proportion of] social services are now carried out by charities. Housing is delivered by approved housing bodies and charities. Things like food kitchens and food banks... Charities rising to the job of looking after the poor – that’s very similar to Victorian London.
One of the best things about Ireland is our notion of fair-mindedness. People try to be decent to each other and do the right thing, especially within their communities. Obviously, there are things on the news that would counter that opinion, but I genuinely still believe that’s a minority. Irish people have a sense of justice and injustice. That was something that could be seen with how people responded as a nation to what’s happening in Palestine.
One of the worst things is the dog poo. And people that put dog poo into bags and throw it in a bush. I can’t get my head around it. It blows my mind. And people talking in cinemas, although that’s getting less.
In conversation with Niamh Donnelly. This interview, part of a series about well-known people’s lives and relationships with Ireland, was edited for clarity and length. More information on Focus Ireland’s No Child Without A Home campaign can be found at focusireland.ie. A Christmas Carol runs at the Gate Theatre from November 21st to January 18th. gatetheatre.ie
