TALENT OF TOM WALSH
Tom Walsh told Gerry McLaughlin about his 40 years with the Phoenix Players and his other great projects
THERE IS definitely something creative in the south Sligo air. This week’s Local Legend is a pretty unique man of many gifts who has put them to very good use for his people in that storied green kingdom of rolling fields nestling under the mighty Ox mountains.
Tom Walsh has been the doyen of drama in and around Tubbercurry for almost 47 years.
For he has acted, produced, directed, and organised many plays and musicals in the area since the acting bug first bit in the early 1970s.
Tom won an All-Ireland medal for his searing portrayal of a neurotic student in Brian Friel’s The Communication Cord in 1985. By then he was well established with the famous Phoenix Players from Tubbercurry, after previously featuring with his local Banada Players, who won a Western Drama title in the 1970s.
He met his wife Mary Walsh through drama as well.
He said: “The first place I saw her was on a stage. I liked her and her acting – and the rest is history.”
He admits that his great love for all aspects of drama and, indeed, film has been helped by the fact that his wife is also an accomplished actor and director.
That grá for the theatre and the stage can be all consuming, so Tom says he is blessed that he has someone to assess what he is doing and give him a reference point for his consuming passion. But it is not just the plays that have engaged him, for Tom is also an enthusiastic and accomplished filmmaker who has made a few productions, the best known of which is The Old Fair Day Conspiracy.
He has always had a great passion for westerns since he watched his first icon James Drury aka The Virginian as a very young man in the 1960s.
So it was no surprise that he made a western film called The 3.10 To Claremorris, which had all the Wild West clichés but also a subtle message that we should have a western railway.
Possibly his greatest legacy will be his hours and hours of filming of life in south Sligo and indeed many other parts of Sligo from 1993 to 2005.
Tom filmed and interviewed many older people in the Moylough area where he now lives, and this has been collected and shown locally.
From 2000 to 2008 he was very active in getting a heritage centre built in Moylough, where those interviews are stored along with various other items of the past in the area.
Before that, in 1992 Tom won a GAA All-Ireland Scór medal for Tubbercurry GAA Club with a novelty act entitled Heaven Help Us, which he co-wrote with some other gifted actors.
In all he has about 300 hours of film that has chronicled how rural life was changing in much of his native south Sligo and also footage of the shop fronts in Sligo town, Ballymote and many parts of west Sligo.
This is a unique treasure trove and a priceless social history of many parts of Sligo.
All of this is now on DVD.
Tom has not been idle in the lockdown as he has been writing film scripts, most notably The Bogfather, a skit on the Godfather in which turf replaces drugs as the illegal product.
The film is set in the future, when our governments have banned all turf cutting, so the families are feuding over “turf” in many respects.
Just before the first lockdown he directed a memorable version of his favourite The Sound Of Music, which played to packed crowds at St Brigid’s Hall.
Listening to Tom, you get the sense that he has the eternal, restless spirit of the artist – always looking for new challenges and ways of putting old wine in new bottles as it were.
In his other life he has been a tax accountant for many years and worked from home long before it became popular or compulsory, while his wife Mary was a teacher in Tubbercurry.
So he has a very balanced existence where he lives and also farms in Powellsborough near Moylough, which is in the parish of Curry.
Tom was born in 1952 in Tourlestrane. His mother’s name was Maureen. His father, Louis Walsh, came from the small village of Tullinaglug. The family ran a small grocery shop in
Tourlestrane and farmed too. The shop ran until 1990. Tom’s only sibling, his sister Pauline, still lives in Tourlestrane.
Tom said: “I have very good memories of an idyllic childhood. Tourlestrane was quite a vibrant little village with two shops, a pub, the post office and the church.
“There was a buzz about the village. Today it has changed and it has a more residential feel to it.
“In the shop we used to weigh out sugar and tea for the week as they did not come in smaller packages. There would be a crowd in shop after Mass for the newspapers on Sunday so you would help out there as well.
“The shop was a focal point, and you knew everybody.
“You had the pensions on Friday.” Tom went to the convent and then to the boys’ school in Banada, where Seán Owens was principal.
TOM SAID: “He was quite innovative, and he was big into gardening as well as history and has a wealth of knowledge”. “There were no plays in primary school. Then I went to Banada secondary school. It was co-ed, which was kind of unique at the time in the 1960s.
“The first play I acted in at secondary school was Murder In The Cathedral. I was actually thrown out of it because I was not getting it right.”
It was Macra na Feirme that really got Tom first treading the boards. He said: “We were lucky that at the time a priest came to our parish called Fr Michael Cryan. He was quite progressive in getting activities going for young people.
“He felt that the more activities that were happening in an area the better – there would be less chance of them drifting to the pub.
“There was an old boys’ school lying derelict, so he got it set up as a community centre.
“I got involved, with a number of
like-minded people. We were all young in our late teens and early 20s and we got the place renovated.
“We got a stage put into it and we formed this Macra na Feirme group. “Macra was a terrific organisation for young people as there were so many different activities that they were involved in – debating, public speaking, question time and farm tasks.
“One of the competitions they ran was a drama competition for oneact plays which was for the western counties.”
By then Tom had got interested in drama through watching TV programmes, most notably westerns and The Virginian with the legendary James Drury .
He said: “I liked westerns and The Virginian was my favourite and James Drury actually came to Ireland in 2008 and his people came from over near Boyle.
“I met him, and I have a photograph taken with him.
“I also watched The Riordans and I found it hard to believe that a lot of these people were just acting and that they were not cowboys or detectives.
“Tom Hickey in The Riordans did not grow up on a farm, but he was so convincing.
“I thought I would love to be able to do that, to portray other characters that were not necessarily me.
“I was quite shy and self-conscious and inhibited in those years and I wanted to prove that I could do something different.
Meanwhile, Tom and his first drama group took their first big step.
“We entered the competition. We had a teacher called Paddy Tobin in Banada and he had some drama experience. We asked him to produce the play and we went on to win the Western Drama finals.
“The play we did was a one-act comedy called A Cure For Nerves.
“But 50 years on I am still looking for that cure for nerves because it is still just as terrifying just before you go out on stage!
‘The play was set in a psychiatric hospital. I was playing the part of a mad psychiatrist who was domineering and had no bedside manner.
“We staged it in St Brigid’s Hall for the first night for the county finals. “The adjudicator was Liam McKinney, who was very active in Sligo drama.
“It was great when we won the Connacht title – we never expected to win.
“In the county final I got my first award for the most promising actor and I still treasure that. That certainly gave me the confidence to keep going at it. “Paddy Tobin got a producer’s award, and another actor got another award as well.
“The cast included Pauline Chapman, sadly deceased, Maura Leonard, Tom O’Hara, Mickey Curran, Edwin Gawley, sadly deceased, and Breege Henry. “That was 1973 and I had started working by then.”
After his Leaving Cert, Tom got a job in Basta in Tubbercurry as a trainee accountant.
He said: “I knew Padraic Neary in those years – he is very gifted.
“I was there until 1976. I was transferred to Tool and Gauge, a sister company. I was doing the management accounts. I was there until 1984.
“Both factories were very important to south Sligo. They gave a lot of employment to people who might otherwise have had to emigrate.”
Tom got married in 1980 and in 1984 he started working as an accountant from home. Tom and Mary have three children, Aidan, Ronan and Dara. They moved to live in Powellsborough, Moylough, in those years.
Tom said: “My wife was teaching at the Marist Convent and I stayed at home looking after our eldest, Aidan. “I set up my own business and started working from home, which I still do as well as the farming.
“Being at home gives you the time to be creative.”
WHILE HE loves the drama, it will always have its challenges. He said: “It was terrifying going out on stage and it has not got any easier. The last play I was in was a twohander, just before Christmas 2019. It is scary and there is no going back. It is not like film where if you fluff the line, you can do a second take.
“With the drama you just have to keep going. But you get some adrenaline as well and you must have great concentration. You can’t let it slip for a second or get distracted by somebody you might see in the front seat in the audience.
“You can get a blank and I have got a blank. I cover it up by hesitating. Sometimes in real life we hesitate too. “I am a great believer when I am directing that what we are doing is rehearsed spontaneity.
“When we are talking in real life, we don’t know what we are going to say next as it depends on what the other person is going to say.
“I remember having a bad experience in a play and it was a fellow actor on a first night who got a blank and we were all unsure of our lines and nobody could help him.
“He had to go off the stage and go down to the dressing-room – there was no prompter – find the page in the script and come back and resume.
“We all stood like frozen statues, and I felt guilty because I could have got him out of it as I had some lines coming up. “That can happen, and it can be quite funny as you may have a blank and the next person might bail you out by saying the next line and it looks like it was them who had the blank.
“It is very unjust in that way.” Meanwhile, following that 1973 victory, Tom set up a drama group in Banada called Banada Drama Group. Throughout the 1970s they performed many farces, and one-act plays locally. Tom said: “We did one called See How They Run and a Neil Simon one called Come Blow Your Horn.
“We also did I’ll Get My Man, which was written by Philip King. That was the first play I directed. It is about a spinster looking for a man.”
“Farces might look easy, but they are more difficult to do than the serious plays.
“It takes split second timing with the lines and the speed and pace.
“Even at the festival level, farces seem to be adjudicated at a higher standard. “You will rarely see groups winning with farces. They seem to go for more serious plays.
“In Banada, we did not do any Irish plays. We seemed to be going for English plays. We also did a US play, My Wife’s Family. We continued as a drama group until the mid-1980s.
“We moved to my wife’s home place in 1986, which is in the Moylough-Curry parish.”
Tom said he finds the farming very therapeutic in his rich, full life.
He said: “I deal mainly with sheep and in the spring, it is lovely to see nature working at lambing time. It can be time consuming, and things might not work out.
“In the lambing season you are always on call. My big problem has always been trying to dovetail the lambing season with the drama season. “Unfortunately the drama season is in the springtime as well, so I have to make sure that when I am bringing the ram into the sheep that I time it well so they don’t clash.”
The highlight of Tom’s career with Banada was a victory in Elphin. They won the Western Final with I’ll Get My Man, which was directed by Paddy Tobin.
Tom said: “I did not take over directing until 1976. Sadly, Paddy’s health deteriorated. We were halfway through My Wife’s Family when I stepped into the directing.
“I learnt a lot of the tricks of the trade of basic stagecraft from Paddy. They included entrances and exits, avoiding things like straight lines and masking where one actor is not hiding the other actor.
“There is also stuff like upstaging and down staging, pacing a play with variety and emphasising the climatic moments for the audience.” A director needs to have loads of diplomacy to deal with very different personalities and the occasional ego. Tom said: “Sometimes some people take handling. There is commitment, too, as people have other jobs and activities and they might not be at rehearsals which can cause problems.”
“I did a course on directing in Gormanstown College, which the Amateur Drama League of Ireland runs every year.
“I also did a course on basic production in the summer of 1976. It gave me the confidence to produce a play the next year. The cast could say, well, this fellow has done a course so maybe he has an idea.”
“I hooked up with the Phoenix Players in Tubbercurry first in 1981. “In Banada we only did plays for audiences around Sligo, Riverstown and Cloonacool. Once we did a play in St Columba’s Hospital in Sligo.
“But we were not on the festival circuit. There was no pressure of competition.
“I knew a lot of the people who were with the Phoenix Players, including my now wife. The first time I saw her was on stage. I liked her more than her acting, and I eventually made my way to her and the rest of it is history.
“Mary was very actively involved in drama as well. She is a great support, and I’ve relied on her advice regarding casting people.
“She would look at a play and very often go to the first performance. She would say, this is wrong – you need to do something different.
“Mary was an accomplished actress herself and directed a few musicals as well in the Marist Convent, where she taught English and history”.
The Phoenix Players are one of the most famous drama groups around, having been founded in 1945.
Tom said: “They went through a dormant period in the 1960s. Joe Masterson had been in England and he came back and helped to revive the group in the early 1970s.
“They were doing plays locally. Johnny O’Dowd, one of the founder members of the Western Drama Festival in Tubbercurry, was also a big help.
“Neighbouring Cloonacool has its own drama group too. There was one year that both groups qualified for the All-Ireland finals in the confined section. That was pretty unique.”
Tom’s first part with the Phoenix Players was in Brian Friel’s Philadelphia Here I Come, in which he played the part of Senator Doogan. Tom said: “I think I was too young for the part – I would make a better stab at it now”.
“Peter Davey played Gar Public. Gar Private was played by John McDwyer, who was working in the bank at the time and has formed his own company. “Eamon Óg Gallagher joined the company later. His first play was Arthur Miller’s A View From The Bridge.” Tom made his directorial debut in a A Daughter From Over The Water by MJ Molloy.
He said: “It was a potboiler for a fundraiser for Christmas. Joe Masterson, Rita Gannon and Peter Davey and a lot of the older actors were in it.
“Peter Davey had started to direct it but had to drop out. He asked me if I would take over – that was in 1988.” Tom, full of enthusiasm, had a vision for big shows and wanted to get as many people involved as possible.
“This was community theatre, and I came up with the idea for a Passion play for Easter.
“I recruited people not just from the Phoenix Players but from the surrounding areas outside of Tubber. We had a cast of 70 to 80 in 1989.
“It was a unique production at the time. We packed out St Brigid’s Hall four nights during Holy Week.
“That was the first time that anything
like that had ever been done before. People still talk about it.
“We actually had to put on an extra show on Easter Sunday night to cope with the crowds.
“It was tinged with sadness as Joe Masterson passed away. He was a great character.
“He was working behind the scenes for the Passion play and did all the PR. He was a master at that and a great support.
“Sadly, he died on Easter Saturday night. It was poignant. We did a special tribute to him on stage after the play on Easter Sunday night.”
A few years earlier, in 1985, Tom won an All-Ireland award for best actor in Athlone.
Tom said: “That was in The Communication Cord by Brian Friel. I played the part of a neurotic undergraduate called Tim Gallagher. It explores language and its effects.
“It is set in an old cottage in Donegal. Two guys come to it from Dublin. One of them is doing a thesis on communications. It is really a farce – there are girlfriends, a local busybody and a senator.
“It is quite a comedy. We got to the AllIreland final in Athlone, so we did quite well with it overall.
“I was delighted as it was the top award you can get in amateur drama. We came fourth in the final.
“We had been tipped to win because there was a great audience reaction to it on the night we did it.
“There was a great buzz in the Phoenix Players at that time. I was not there for the awards due to a family bereavement. There were no mobile phones, so I didn’t know about it until I heard it announced on RTÉ radio the next morning.
“I got a very nice surprise. There was no presentation as things were low-key at the time, but we had a function in the group to wind up the season.”
TOM CONTINUED acting and directing. In 1991 he directed his first musical, Calamity Jane. “I don’t have a note in my head. I can’t sing and I can’t dance. But I put a team of people together who could, and I had a musical director and a choreographer as well.
“I concentrated on the acting and did that. We packed St Brigid’s Hall for a week. Local pharmacist Mary Barry did the part of Calamity Jane. She is still acting with the group.
“We don’t have a musical society in Tubbercurry. I have often thought that I would like to see one formed as we have quite a lot of musical talent in the area. “It is amazing the amount of people who will get involved in a musical but not in straight drama.
“It is the fact that a lot of people can sing and dance and are part of a group or chorus.
“In drama you are singled out and you have a part to play on your own. In a musical you are part of a group and there is not the same pressure on people.
“In 1995 we were celebrating our 50th anniversary and I did another Biblical play called Two From Galilee, a Nativity play. There was a big cast and that was very popular.
“Then in 2019, I directed The Sound Of Music. That went down well also. I always wanted to do that one as it was one of the first films I saw.
“I was lucky in that I got a great cast. I had a very good lighting director with me, Seán Johnston, who is sadly deceased. He was able to create magic on stage with the lighting.”
What is the difference between directing a play and a musical?
Tom said: “There are some differences, but I was lucky in that I had people who were able to act as well as sing. They were all experienced actors as well so that was a big help.
“The biggest problem with musicals is the logistics – you have a big crowd on stage and have to move them around. “A lot of the people in the choruses might not be used to being on stage so you might have to go through it a few times to get people into the right positions.”
Meanwhile, the Phoenix Players won a competition under the Drama League of Ireland, which is made up of all the drama groups. The Amateur Drama Council of Ireland is behind the festivals.
Tom said: “We entered competitions under both groups. We won the Drama League of Ireland one with Philadelphia Here I Come in 1981.
“Our director at that time was Philip O’Gorman. He really put the group on the map and he was a very good director.
“We won a lot of festivals and got to a lot of All-Irelands in those years. We were one of the top groups in the country.
“There are two sections in drama, open and confined. We have nearly always tried to take part in the open competitions. We were there in 1985 and the final is always in Athlone.
“The confined section rotates around the provinces. We got second in the AllIreland final in this section with At The Black Pig’s Dyke. That was directed by Peter Davey.
“We were looking forward last year to taking part in the confined finals, which had been due to take place in Ballyshannon.”
Tom has now been with the Phoenix Players for almost 40 years.
He has put in many hundreds of hours with the group as well as doing work with other groups.
He said: “One year I worked with the Charlestown Players. We did Aristocrats, again by Brian Friel, and we went to Israel with that show in 1997. “I did another show with The Glens Centre with Prin Duignan and that was The Home Place in 2009.
“I was also involved with a Beez Kneez company in Carrick-on-Shannon for John McDwyer with Lovely Leitrim and Callaghan’s Place.They were done from 1999 to 2003. We went to London also.
“At the moment I am doing a play called Twilight. We did a run in the Dock in Carrick-on-Shannon in October of 2019. We were planning to go on tour and we are hoping to start that next February, all things being good. “The one-act festivals are due to start in November and it depends on a lot of things.”
But the pandemic has had a huge impact on Tom and his passion.
“It brought everything to a sudden halt. We were halfway through the circuit, and we were running our own festival in Tubber on the week that the first lockdown happened.
“The Communication Cord was on, and the hall was packed with 300 people. The lockdown came on March 12 and the group were on their way to Carrigallen to take part in another festival and actually had to turn back at Carrick-on-Shannon.
“2020 was the 75th Anniversary of the Phoenix Players and we were doing a special musical memories show at that time. We had been rehearsing it since before Christmas and we were due to put it on in two weeks and it went kaput and there was 80 to 90 people involved in it.
“It is heartbreaking and I get quite despondent at times and I just wonder will we ever get fully back to what we were doing.”
But on the plus side, the lockdown has unlocked Tom’s writing talents. He said: “I am writing film scripts now.”
Tom bought a video camera in the early 1990s and this was the start of a great social history of south Sligo on film which would be priceless for future historians.
“I started recording stuff around the place because I was conscious that things were changing all the time. “There was a group of us involved, John McGwynn, sadly deceased and former local councillor Michael Fleming and we set about interviewing all the old people of the parish around Moylough and we got a whole lot of history from them, and they are all on DVD film now.
“We also videoed the different activities from the spring of 1993 to the spring of 1994 I called it ‘Moylough In All Seasons’ and we released that on video and sold them locally and they were shown at a launch night and there was six hours of video.”
THERE IS no doubt but that would make a great book. “We interviewed 20 to 30 people. There are a lot of old customs that are dying out and they have been captured in film.”
Tom also did a major project of film and interviews in his native Tourlestrane in 1999 and has produced 18 different DVDs from the Tourlestrane-Kilmactugue parish and he and others did a video in every townland.
Tom has always been interested in films from his childhood.
“I always liked them, and I always wanted to make my own film and I made The Old Fair Day Conspiracy in 2005. It was in August, and we used to do some street theatre for it.
In 2004 there was a cloudburst in the middle of it and everybody just scattered into the pubs and they did very well. So I came up with the idea that the pubs had come up with a conspiracy to bring the bad weather for the next year. They hired the services of an ex- KGB agent who had a chemical they could release
“In 2019, I directed The Sound Of Music. I always wanted to do that one as it was one of the first films that I had seen. I was lucky as we had a great cast”
into the atmosphere to make it rain. “I wrote the script and the Fair Committee through Padraic Neary hired in a special private detective called Séamus Pond.
“It was a take-off of the James Bond films. We had a character called Sore Throat who was passing information. “It was all amateur. I used a lot of the Phoenix Players and others. We filmed scenes during the Fair Day and it went down very well.
“I had a very good camera man, the late Seán Johnston. We had a premiere night in St Brigid’s Hall. We all dressed up, and we had vintage cars there as well.
“It was a great night. Tubber native Dearbhla Walsh, a major TV producer and director, was there to open the premiere. She had been involved with the Phoenix Players – she has gone to the top in the media now.
“We sold DVDs of it afterwards. It was mighty.”
Meanwhile, Tom is passionate about the West On Track and he feels that the Western Railway corridor should be opened again.
He said: “It is a pity that this is not happening. I wanted to draw attention to this in a kind of an obscure way “I had this passion for Westerns, and I wrote a script for The 3.10 To Claremorris. It was a western and we were using Hondas instead of horses. “It was the idea that seven different people with different skills got together and decided to take on the building of the railway themselves rather than wait for the government to do it.
“They were based on The Magnificent Seven.
“I had great fun doing it because I was able to use all the stock cliché scenes that you have in westerns – bank robberies, saloon brawls and even a sheep stampede.
“The Seven were there to help the downtrodden in the west of Ireland who were neglected by the powers-that-be in the east of the country. “That film went well and got great co-operation and shot some scenes in the train station in Sligo.
“We eventually got the railway up on track and we hijacked the Sligo Dublin train in Collooney and sent it to Claremorris.”
Tom managed to get that film included in the Galway Film Fleadh in 2011.
FILM IS a very different medium to the stage and there are many chances to go over scenes. Tom discovered that it is often the case that some of the people who had not acted on stage actually came across better on film.
He said: “Stage acting is about projection and trying to be larger than life. But in film the camera is up close, so you don’t need this overreaction. All you need is an eye movement or something relatively minor.
“People who are used to the stage can come across as slightly over-acting. “The other difference is that stage is one continuous story, but in film you are doing different scenes in different times.
“Your character has to be in a particular mindset for a particular scene. “But it did not matter a lot in our case as we were doing comedy.
“We got very good reaction to it. At the launch we had people like Peter Bowen Walsh from Collooney and Fr Michael McGreil. There are still people who are looking for copies of that film on DVD.”
Tom was an extra in many films. He said: “I am friendly with Johnny Gogan and I was in Black Ice, a film he made down in Dromahair.
“I was in Jimmy’s Hall, directed by Ken Loach. It is a great story”.
These days Tom is trying to edit some of the many, many hours of film that he
Tom on location during filming for The 3.10 To Claremorris. has created at home on his computer. “I have filmed ordinary people and I have filmed Tubber.
“In Tubbercurry in 1997 we celebrated the 600th anniversary of the town and we interviewed all the businesspeople in the town that year. Eamon Óg Gallagher and Roger McCarrick did the interviews.
“We did a Day In The Life Of Tubbercurry, which we did in one day in May 1997 from 6am in the morning to about midnight.
“I am far more interested in filming the ordinary, but it is constantly changing, and you don’t realise it until it is gone.
Tom has also filmed extensively outside of Tubber.
He said: “In the year 2000 I filmed quite a lot of the towns and villages of Sligo. I videoed all the shop fronts in Sligo, Ballymote, Riverstown and villages in west Sligo.
“I remember in 1997 for the Tubber 600 we did a Famine Walk to remember a famous horse who helped save some communities.
“The Phoenix Players did an eviction scene out in Lough Talt, where we had a cottage and burned it out.
“At the time, John Taylor was involved in the heritage day in
Riverstown and he contacted me to see if we would do it down in Riverstown. “I did an interview with North West Radio and I came an hour too soon. I spent the hour going around videoing all around Riverstown, and I mean to donate that to the people in Riverstown.”
Tom’s unique social history is crying out for a script, and he is currently writing film scripts – so that script might not be too far away.
Tom said: “I started writing scripts and I have been writing away during lockdown.
“I have the first draft of a romantic tale about an elderly bachelor farmer and an English lady from London and it is set over 12 months from May 2019 and it covers the pandemic.
“It is called The Intrusion. I might even consider doing it as a short story but would not attempt filming it myself. “I have even written a western called Sundown. It is set on a ranch in Montana in the 1880s. I might publish it too.”
He has another one written called The Bogfather, a skit on The Godfather. Instead of getting a horse’s head in the post the enemies of The Bogfather could be getting a donkey’s head!
Tom said: “It is set in the future and as the bogs have been declared illegal by the government, they are dealing in turf instead of dealing in drugs.
“The drugs have been legalised. “There are all these different families, and the script is finished.
“I tend to write late at night. I also tried to make sure I was clashing with the evening news on television because I was sick of all that bad news about the Covid. It was getting me down and I would shoot into the office and do an hour of wriring.
Pandemic permitting, Tom would like to get The Bogfather script off the ground.
“It is one that I could film myself and I could get the cast and direct them and there is no shortage of bogs around.” Overall, Tom has led a very rich, creative and full life.
“I have been lucky that for a lot of things that I instigated, there was collaboration with talented people who helped make these projects possible. “I would not have the skills to do everything on my own.
“I am not good with my hands, so I need carpenters. I am not good at the technical things, so I need people who are good at that and I need lots of help for musicals.
“I am very lucky that my wife, as well as being an accomplished actor and director herself, is a very tolerant woman that was able to put up with all the chaos that is in a house when all these things are going on.
“She is a great support, and it is great that you have someone you can bounce ideas off and I am very lucky that way”. So what advice does Tom have for budding actors and directors?
He said: “I would advise that if they have a leaning for drama to join a local group.
“I do fear a little for the future of amateur drama.
“If we are doing a big show, we can get plenty of people on board. But committees are ageing and there seems to be very few people under 50 on some committees.
“When I started off around 1980, we were all very young, but you do need administrators.
“Doing drama has brought me great joy and stimulation over the years and it has been great for self-expression. I have met so many people from all over the country who have become great friends of mine.
ONE THING is certain. There are very few people who have put as much of their heart, soul and considerable talents into drama and film in south Sligo. Take a bow, Tom!