The Wedding Community Play Project: a cross-community production in Northern Ireland

Abstract

My name is Geraldine Moriarty. My father's family is from Kerry in the South of Ireland; they were Catholic, became Protestant. My mother's family are Protestant and Catholic, ‘mixed’ marriages through several generations. I was brought up in a small Nationalist town on the coast between Ireland and Scotland; my family was pro-Unionist and lower middle class. I left Ireland to study and stayed in England for eighteen years to live and work as a community artist. I left shortly after the beginning of ‘The Troubles’ (usually reckoned from the year 1969). The political struggle for civil rights by Catholics living in the North of Ireland had been drowned in sectarian violence. British troops were on the streets and the strength and violent response of the IRA and Protestant paramilitaries was on the increase. I left very specifically because a friend was shot dead in the streets of Belfast. I came back twelve years ago when the confusion and hurt I felt living away from home outweighed the confusion, hurt and fear that had driven me away in the first place. I came back in the hope that I could make a contribution, however small, to what had begun to be understood as a process that might enable all the people of Ireland to live, thrive and build a future together. When I came back I spent time working as a drama worker and community theatre director in Nationalist and Loyalist communities in North and East Belfast.