I was born in Dublin and lived here until I was 13. I have an English mother. I always felt Irish, but people would go, “Are you English?” because we spoke with her intonations. Sometimes people have a funny response to that.
I went to a convent school, Muckross Park. One of the teachers was a native Irish speaker. When I was in 6th class, she approached my parents and said: “I think Mary Kate has a gift for languages – there’s a scholarship you should put her forward for." They did, and I spent the last three months of my primary school education in Indreabhán, Connemara, studying trí Gaeilge.
Two years later, we moved to Copenhagen. My deal with my parents was, I would move to Denmark as long as I could keep going back to Irish college. I went to Coláiste na bhFiann, where they’d send you home if you spoke a full sentence in English. Afterwards, I kept it up. Even though I was no longer in the Irish school system, I did an Irish O-Level, and then did Irish in the International Baccalaureate.
When we got to Copenhagen, it was like having gone somewhere over the rainbow. It was 1980, Ireland was a very economically deprived country and Denmark was not. Suddenly, there was a public transport system that was clean and safe and covered the entire city. Copenhagen was a cycling city in 1980, long before Dublin ever was. There was enormous freedom for a 13-year-old. Suddenly we were taking continental holidays and ski trips, which would not have been on the bingo card here.
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I spent my 20s in the UK and in Italy. When I was 31, I thought: one more year and I’ll have spent more time outside of Ireland than in it, so I came home. That was the best thing I ever did, but I’ve always had this love of Denmark and I go back all the time.
The most out of place I’ve ever felt is in the UK. The people look the same, the landscape is the same, the weather is the same, we have a language in common, but their values are completely different.
Culture in Britain is very practical. They live very much in the material world. Irish culture is more dreamy. We’re poetic. We’re interested in ideas and abstract things. Non-material values are very important to us. That’s why we always had hedge schools. It was like: it’s okay if we’re poor, but can we at least learn? Can we at least share ideas? The didactic power of conversation in an Irish pub is extraordinary. You don’t get that in a bar in London.
In the last 20 years we’ve adopted values of capitalism from the UK and the US, and it’s not good for us. They’re not our values. During the Celtic Tiger we suddenly said: hey, can we be rich? The housing crisis was entirely manufactured by banks to profit a very few people. By selling out and taking on capitalistic values, I would say we’re in danger of selling our birthright. Our birthright is to be generous, inclusive, curious, adventurous, and optimistic in the face of real adversity. Denmark is a similarly-sized country to Ireland. We could do better to emulate it than the UK or the US.
I’m super proud of how Ireland is standing with Palestine. Somebody said to me recently that it could really hurt us economically, and I was reminded of a film project I worked on about the Dunnes Stores workers. They had a meeting with a Labour leader who said the same thing. That was the 1970s, when Ireland was extremely poor. Working on that film project, I said, “Put a line in, going: are you telling us we can’t afford morals?”
For the last 20 years, I’ve travelled the world giving workshops, screenwriting, and working as a consultant on film and television projects. I love it. My brain was designed for story. Ten years ago, The Moth Story Slam came to Dublin. I hadn’t heard of a story slam, but the best way of describing it is competitive storytelling. I went along one night. The theme was mothers, and I thought: I have a story about my mother. I put my name in the hat and won. Then I won the Grand Slam in the Abbey. A couple of months later, I entered a slam in LA and won that, too.
I got to go back and compete in the Grand Slam. That story went viral. An Irish theatre maker, Will O’Connell, saw it and got in touch. I told him I wanted to make a show out of my stories, and he said he’d help. I told my sister, and she said, you should 100 per cent “make a show out of yourself”. We had a title.
I love to say I’m bringing seanchas (the practice of storytelling) back to Ireland, but I’m not the only one. There’s this total upsurgence and desire for it. To me, the reason why stories are the most important thing in the world is that you can’t endure suffering if it feels meaningless. Stories are how we give our lives meaning.
In conversation with Niamh Donnelly. This interview is part of a series about well-known people’s lives and relationship with Ireland, and was edited for clarity and length. Making a Show of Myself by Mary Kate O’Flanagan plays at The Mash House at the Edinburgh Fringe from July 31st-August 24th. For tickets, see edfringe.com.
