‘O
h my God, it’s so nice
to be interviewed by
someone with the
same accent!’ ” exclaims
Saoirse-Monica Jackson,
on the publicity round
for the third and final series of Derry
Girls. She’s being generous — our
accents aren’t the same, really. Jackson
was born and brought up in Derry, and
she sounds just as she does in the show
— but with none of her character Erin
Quinn’s whining and self-aggrandising.
I was born two hours down the
road, south of Belfast, where our
accents are already a bit softer, and
mine has (according to everyone back
home, at least) been anglicised by five
years away. How did she manage to
hold on to hers now she has surfed all
the way to Hollywood thanks to the
unlikely global success of a comedy
about teenagers in the Troubles? “Mine
has not been neutralised at all,” she
says defiantly. “As an actor you
have to maintain a strong
sense of self.”
It’s certainly worked for
Jackson. Just a few years
ago she was going door to
door flogging HelloFresh
recipe box subscriptions
to pensioners in Man-
chester. Then she got the
call for Derry Girls and
hasn’t looked back. The
show, Channel 4’s biggest
comedy hit since
Father Ted, is
about a group
of Catholic
schoolgirls
navigating
adolescence.
Standing in
their way are
their moth-
ers, the no-
nonsenseheadmistress Sister Michael — oh, and
there is also the Troubles.
Series one had 2.5 million viewers
on Channel 4, while series two jumped
to well over 3 million. After a three-
year, Covid-induced wait and a Netflix
release that has brought in a global
audience, the final series is expected to
have even more. Derry now boasts a
giant mural of Jackson and her co-stars.
Tourists come for walking tours of the
show’s locations. In Northern Ireland,
that’s a very big deal.
The show has been credited with
educating young people beyond North-
ern Ireland about the Troubles, but it
has also opened up conversations for
those who lived through it. Northern
Ireland’s version of the English stiff
upper lip is to laugh off trauma, and we
see that play out in Derry Girls — think
of Aunt Sarah complaining about miss-
ing her sunbeds because of a bomb
scare. This dark humour has allowed
survivors of what was really a
civil war — which claimed
3,500 lives in a place with
the population of Kent
— to process what hap-
pened to them and
their families. “People
[who have seen Derry
Girls] would tell me a
funny story, but it
would end up being a
sad story, and a poign-
ant turning point in
their lives,” Jackson
says. “As an
actor it’s a gift
to be part of
that, to help
people to
open up in
this way.”
It is all
the more
powerful
because“ceasefire babies” like Jackson and me
(she is 28, I’m 24), who were born near
the end of the conflict, grew up largely
unaware of the full horrors of the Trou-
bles. “Families protected children from
it and gave them a very normal child-
hood.” But, like the Derry Girls, things
we accepted as normal really weren’t. I
remember leaving a shopping centre
because of a bomb scare; in Derry
there was an army barracks at the bot-
tom of Jackson’s street. “The soldiers
were patrolling with these huge guns
when we were out on the street playing
games. Soldiers weren’t there to do
anything wrong, they were the back-
drop, like lampposts,” Jackson explains.
This even-handed perspective owes
much to her upbringing. Her mother is
from Donegal in the Republic, where
she ran a pub, and “had different opin-
ions” from her father, who is from
Derry. “They wanted us to have our
own opinions... not to be scared of the
world.” At one point she refers to
“Northern Ireland”, the term favoured
by unionists. She is a nationalist
who considers herself Irish and she
quickly corrects herself: “The north of
Ireland, sorry.”
“I definitely do think that there’s a
difference being from the north of Ire-
land — it’s an identity in itself, whether
you identify as British or Irish. We have
our own thing going on,” she says. I am
inclined to agree — Northern Ireland’s
culture, our sense of humour, even our
boring uncles are distinct.
When we left Derry Girls at the end
of series two, the IRA had just
announced its 1994 ceasefire and Presi-
dent Clinton had visited the city, calling‘I’LL ALWAYS BE
A DERRY GIRL’
Nicola Coughlan
Catapulted to fame
as the permanently
anxious Clare Devlin,
Coughlan is now
just as well known
as Penelope
Featherington, the queen of gossip
in Netflix’s period hit Bridgerton.Jamie-Lee
O’Donnell
She is brilliant as the
outrageous Michelle,
and just as ballsy in
Channel 4’s Screw,
as a newbie prison
officer in an all-male block.Louisa Harland
Erin’s cousin Orla
is away with the
fairies most of the
time. Harland’s
latest film, Boys from
County Hell, is a
vampire comedy.Dylan Llewellyn
The “wee English fella”
is playing a university
fresher in Channel 4’s
forthcoming sitcom
Big Boys. He’s also
the guitarist Wally
Nightingale in Danny Boyle’s drama
about the Sex Pistols, Pistol, coming
to Disney+ in May.LIFE AFTER DERRY GIRLS
As the comedy set amid the Troubles
returns, Saoirse-Monica Jackson
reveals how the unlikely hit
changed her life. By Laura Hackett
TELEVISION
JOSH SHINNER12 10 April 2022