I had the honour of acting in this short film. #DepressionHurts wins Best Shorts Competition, California, USA   Dublin,Ireland, May 1, 2012…#DepressionHurts video has won a prestigious Award of Merit from the Best Shorts Competition,California. The award was given for the special purpose video created by a volunteer team to highlight awareness of mental illness and depression.   The project and film was made with the support volunteers from social media network Twitter, who together with producer Norah Bohan and director Alan Lavender helped co-ordinate Ireland’s first 24/7 Twitter helpline for depression and suicide, which ran for the nine days of Christmas and New Year 2011. Lavender said, “We called the video ‘It Starts With You’ – because it does! It’s how YOU think and behave that either adds to the hurt of depression or suicide or helps the sufferers. We know to change attitude & remove stigma to depression and suicide, ‘It Starts With You’ and we hope lots of ‘You’ will decide to be part of the change. ”Winning the Best Shorts Award of Merit is a tremendous boost to our team. It will certainly help us continue with our important project.” Winning the Award of Merit has […]

It’s been a very funny start to the year. My five minutes of fame seem to have extended to twelve months of fame, and it doesn’t appear to be stopping anytime soon. You may be familiar with me. I joking call myself the ‘brokest woman in Ireland’ and that may not be so far from the truth. An accident of divorce and the recession left me holding the baby, or rather a one million euro mortgage on a house worth less than half that. I cannot afford to live in the house and I am at the pin of my collar to support and keep my two teenage daughters. Currently, we live in a rented cottage some ten miles from our original house, but it may as well be 100 miles away. I have sold everything from my old house to pay for bills. This year is a bit bleak as I have nothing left to sell and the bills keep coming. In 2011 I decided to sell my house (the beautiful Georgian Raheengraney House, just outside Shillelagh), come what may. I made a video, posted it on You Tube and it went viral. Mark Little from RTE was in […]

Exporting is part of our culture. Since we learnt we were on an island we have expended as much time getting off as we have expelling invaders. Our monks have sailed boats in far flung adventures while repelling invaders became a part of our lives once St Patrick expelled the snakes. When we couldn’t get rid of our next influx of unwanted visitors we often resorted to down right, low down tactics and married them. Think of the Normans more Irish than the Irish themselves. We consumed our invaders and we exported our under-the-radar colonists. The only difference with our colonising is that we used words and song and music to grab emotional landbanks across the world. A recent comment on WorldIrish had one non Irish commenter suggest there were 40million living today on this small island. The sheer weight would of course have sunk our patch of green but it is a testament to the vast export of our numbers over the years. For an island race we are an interesting mix of conflicting characteristics. For an island race, we don’t really swim that well as a nation, we could argue we don’t have the weather. We don’t really […]