A New Life:A background in teaching and the arts led Trish Forde to identify a need for, and then to establish, a children's arts festival, she tells Michelle McDonagh.
As one of the founders of the annual Baboró International Arts Festival in Galway and a former primary school teacher, Trish Forde is very aware of the importance of the arts to children.
"I think we underestimate the power of the arts in children's lives. In school, they deal with the head, but the arts speak directly to the heart. During Baboró, our children have what I consider to be their right - exposure to work created for them by professionals that does not patronise and deals with issues relevant to them like bullying or divorce.
"Some of the most popular shows are not issue-driven at all. It's an experience of pure poetry, beautiful images and a wonderful story that children come away enriched from," she says.
Through poetry and the arts, Forde believes that children can learn empathy and a kind of spirituality that is vital in a society where religion no longer fills a major void and youth suicide is on the increase. However, Forde bemoans the fact that there are very few professional companies in Ireland making professional work for children and she hopes that Baboró can help to change this situation.
"We do not have many professional companies making work specifically for children, apart from a handful of companies involved in education. We see a rush of children's shows around Christmas which are usually money-making ventures of a very low standard. I'm not talking about the traditional pantos, they are great and children love them.
"I'm talking about plays that patronise children, fail to grasp the issues of the day that concern children and do not give them a life- enhancing experience."
Forde graduated from UCG with a BA in 1977, and in 1980, she started to do some "bits and pieces" of acting with Druid and to write "stuff that never saw the light of day at that stage".
At the end of the year, she decided to go on to train in national school teaching at St Patrick's College in Drumcondra, Dublin.
Work was scarce in the 1980s but Forde was fortunate enough to get a job in Scoil Chaitríona in Renmore, Galway, where she taught for five years before moving to Scoil Rois at Taylor's Hill for another five years.
Forde started to write plays for her young pupils and very soon, she began to see that the arts could be very important in their lives. One of her passions was reading to the children and she spent a lot of time encouraging them to read and write and introducing them to the favourite authors of her own childhood, such as Enid Blyton.
While she was still teaching, Forde began working for EO Teilifís in Spiddal and she wrote the children's series, Mise agus Pangúr Bán, for RTÉ.
In 1990 Forde decided to take a year out from teaching to write a children's book. She started writing in September and at Christmas, Ollie Jennings, the then artistic director of the Galway Arts Festival, called to her house and asked her to stand in for him for a year as he was going on tour with The Saw Doctors.
Five festivals later, she was still there and Jennings never came back. She managed to write the book, Tír Faoi Thoinn, that year, which was about a little boy who went under the sea and was published by Salmon Publishing in Galway, but it was a while before she had time to write her second book, The King's Secret (O'Brien's Press).
As artistic director with the arts festival, Forde travelled all over the world to check out shows. However, after five years she felt it was time to move on as she had used a lot of the ideas she went in with, one of which was Baboró.
Having worked full-time as an editor on Ros na Rún for three years after resigning from the arts festival and working part-time on other writing and editing projects, Forde decided to take a year out last year to write another book for children, called Dig Deep, for which she is currently seeking a publisher.
Forde is married to event manager Padraic Boran, whom she met through DramSoc at UCG, and the couple have two children, James (9) and Rosa (7), who they adopted from Guatemala.
For the future, Forde hopes to keep writing children's books from home so she can be with the children and work at something she loves at the same time. These days, she says, she doesn't know the meaning of "spare time" but any chance she gets, she loves to read, often children's books by authors such as Philip Pullman, Eoin Colfer and Meg Rosoff as well as old favourites such as The Railway Children and The Secret Garden.
She is also working as a script writer for TG4's Aifric - a programme for young people which won a BAFTA for Best Young People's Programme.