It’s brilliant to get a chance to tell modern, contemporary and compelling stories in our language of choice – SAM O’FEARRAIGH
Sam O’fearraigh (Frankie Mcfadden)
Sam is a script writer for Ros na Rún, and also has a role as Frankie, someone viewers hope will get his comeuppance for his not-so-nice antics.
Sam has strong Scottish heritage – his grandfather was a navvy in Glasgow – and that’s where his father is from, while his mother hails from Dublin. The family moved to Donegal, where Sam grew up.
Irish was not Sam’s first language. “My grandparents were native speakers, but they refused to pass it on because it had been a disadvantage to them in Scotland,” he explains. Sam’s interest in languages, and Irish in particular, evolved when he was in his 20s.
“When I left college, I trained as an English language teacher. I had always blamed myself for not applying myself more to Irish, but when I learned how to teach languages, I saw that there is a huge difference in how we learn languages in school and how languages are taught professionally. I realised it wasn’t my fault that I never acquired the language,” says Sam.
“I moved to South Korea to teach English and brought nothing but Irish language books. I really applied myself, studying, listening to the news, to the radio, reading online – I watched Ros na Rún – and when I got back to Ireland, I did my Master’s and I acquired fluency,” he says.
“I am finished teaching now. I wanted to be a writer, and decided I’d take a year to learn. I got a short story into a workshop that got shared around and got me my first publication. And then Ros na Rún put out a call for writers, so I applied and here I am,” he says. He hopes to finish his first novel, in Irish, this year.
“Sometimes when you’re an Irish speaker, you can feel like you’re living in an alternate world. I live bilingually and that’s a big part of my identity. But then you meet Irish people who think that half your life is a hobby, whose only knowledge of Irish is as an academic subject. But for me, Irish is the pub, it’s my friends, it’s work. It’s going clubbing in Dublin at the queer clubs. There are so many of us in this country who are living modern contemporary lives through Irish. Some people might think Ros na Rún is a fantasy world because it’s Irish speaking, but a lot of us actually live in that world, and it’s brilliant to get a chance to tell stories – modern, contemporary and compelling stories– in our language of choice,” says Sam.