Róisín Gallagher: "We think of ourselves as being really great craic and really great craic equates to having loads of pints"

You wait ages for an A-List West Belfast actor to come along and then... Having spent the morning talking to Anthony Boyle about his quadruple-whammy of starring roles in Master Of The Air, Manhunt, Shardlake and Say Nothing, I’m now having an afternoon cuppa with Róisín Gallagher who’s about to make us laugh like hyenas again in season two of  RTÉ’s The Dry.

Anthony, who did his teenage drinking on the Twinbrook Pitches, has asked me to pass on neighbourly greetings to Róisín who’s as surprised as he is that they’ve never met.

“Aw, that’s lovely of him,” she beams. “He’s a Twinbrook boy, right? I’m from Colin Glen Forest on the Blacks Road.”

Is one posher than the other?

“I would say I had the slight edge in terms of the crowd I hung around with on a Friday night,” Róisín laughs.

“I was a lady compared to the Twinbrook gang!” I think we’ve just given birth to a Colin Glen Forest vs. Twinbrook beef! If you haven’t already immersed yourself in The Dry, the action centres around Shiv Sheridan, a recovering alcoholic who after a decade of being a London party girl returns home to Dublin. The combination of a spectacularly dysfunctional family and a boyfriend who’s the dictionary definition of feckless means that the temptation to go back on the gargle is strong.

While there are some sitcom characters you gradually warm to, our love affair with Shiv started ninety seconds into the first episode of The Dry when she uttered the immortal line: “I don’t care a fuck about fucking Jesus!”

“How could you say ‘no’ to playing a character who has dialogue like that?” Róisín says. “It was that and the other line about the CBS disco and fingers – I won’t explain any further! – which had me in stitches reading the script.”

I hope Róisín realises that she’s going to hell when she dies. “Yeah, yeah, I am!” Is it the first time that she’s sworn so profusely?

“For work purposes as opposed to how much I swear?” she deadpans. “I’m going to play a nun next so I don’t get typecast, although they have their moments too. But, yeah, it is the first time I’ve played somebody who swears as much as Shiv does.”

Did Róisin have to warn her mammy, Pat, that she was using the f-word as a noun, verb, adjective, adverb and interjection?

“No, she’s heard it all before so no shocks. Taking Mum out of the equation, there are probably a few aunts I’d try and dissuade from watching!”

Róisín’s impeccable southside accent belies the fact that she’d never worked in Dublin prior to The Dry.

“I didn’t really understand the nuance of south Dublin vs north Dublin until I was gifted with a dialect coach, Brendan Gunne, who explained the city to me from the point of view of Shiv and where she grew up,” she explains. “He advised me to continually speak like her at home and going into shops because the more it got under my skin, the less I’d sound like I was doing a voice. This has never happened to me before but when I was prepping for the recall audition something just, I dunno, sank in and I knew exactly who Shiv was and that I could be her.”

Robert De Niro, eat your method acting heart out! Róisín then learned the requisite loikes, fockings and totes mortos living among the natives.

“I stayed in Ballsbridge and we filmed in Foxrock, so it was all very genteel and nice! Dublin actually has quite a similar vibe to Belfast – it’s friendly and warm and I’ve really enjoyed my time there.”

The Dry is obviously a comedy but, given the subject matter, also quite serious. I was watching the season two opener the other night with my partner who suddenly looked at me and said, “Is that your second bottle of wine?!” I’m sure there have been similar conversations in other Shiv-loving households.

Was the Belfast Róisín grew up in a hard-drinking city?

“I imagine the culture was pretty similar to the one in the South,” she suggests. “There’s that old preconceived Irish idea that we turn everything into a party and drink at it. We think of ourselves as being really great craic and really great craic equates to having loads of pints.

“Maybe not so much now, but during The Troubles there wasn’t a way to deal with the trauma at the time. You have to survive someway and I think there was a generation who used alcohol to deal or cope or sleep.”

Would Róisín have been aware of the domestic abuse, which that type of joyless drinking so often leads to?

“There was a sense of, ‘Oh, her daddy drinks’ or ‘Her mummy drinks’ or ‘They’re both drinkers in that house’ and a further sense of, ‘Ah, okay, move on’,” she recalls. “In my growing up, it was never investigated any further or unpacked any more. There was an acceptance of, ‘That’s what they do down the street, so just be careful and mind yourself.’ I don’t think that’s the right way to go about things.”

When I arrived in Ireland in the early 1980s, there were still men-only snugs and bartenders who refused to serve women pints.

“I don’t recall ever being told I can’t sit in a snug because I’m a woman and thank god for that because it would have been my moral duty to have had a very strong word!”

Getting back to the giggles and – SPOILER ALERT!!!! – season two of The Dry finds a fallen-off-the-wagon Shiv sober again but not exactly at one with the world.

“She’s finding her emotions difficult to manage and starting to realise that people and places are a threat to her sobriety,” Róisín reflects. “To be okay and safe she needs to be in control of things, but then the hot guy turns up, asks her out on a date and throws a hand grenade into her life. She’s pushed out into the world and has to deal with no longer being in her comfort zone.”

Cue much tonsil tennis with Alex, Shiv’s new bonk interest who’s played with smouldering aplomb by Offaly thesp Sam Keeley. If it were me, I think I’d giggle my way through the smoochy stuff, but how does Róisín deal with it?

“There was a good bit of giggling, aye,” she admits. “There’s a scene in the car where Shiv leans in for a peck but Sam’s character turns his head and she misses. It’s so awkward and kept cracking us up. Thank goodness for intimacy coordinators is what I say!”

What’s Róisín generally like for corpsing, which is actor-speak for laughing when you really shouldn’t? “Terrible,” she admits. “Especially when Tara Lynne O’Neill’s involved as well. Awful! I’ve done a few stage plays with Tara when I’ve been giddy anyway from the adrenaline and the nerves and she’s set me off. Siobhan Cullen, AKA Caroline Sheridan in The Dry and her screen partner Eoin Duffy are also very, very funny and liable to make you corpse at any moment. It’s a privilege to have that as a problem in your work place, though.”

Best-known for playing Mary Quinn in Derry Girls, the aforementioned Tara Lynne O’Neill was one of Róisín’s best friends growing up.

“She’s a great girl. There’s a couple of years between us but we grew up on the same estate and went to the same school in Andersonstown, St. Genevieve’s.”

Which at the height of The Troubles in 1972 was taken over by the British Army.

“Yeah, the old site of St. Gen’s was up in Edenmore in Andytown and it was used at one point as a camp. The British Army came in and ordered everybody to leave. Local folklore has it that Sister Luca, one of the Louis House nuns who fought for the school to be there in the first place, used to stand at the gate with her fellow nuns and politely ask the British Army to move on because these girls needed educating. This was long before I went there but she was an incredible woman who passed away recently and that story was retold at her funeral. There wasn’t a dry eye in the church.

“Anyway,” Róisín continues, “it was seeing Tara Lynne in a play in the Old Museum Arts Centre in Belfast which made me think, ‘I could do this.’ There was a moment of understanding that this person, who’d been to the same school I was in and lived on the same street as me, is doing this job and being paid for it.”

It’s rare nowadays to look through a BBC, Netflix, Hulu, Showtime, Disney+, Amazon Prime or other major production company cast and crew list and not see a couple of Irish women involved.

“I feel massively empowered by the likes of Sharon Horgan, Aisling Bea and Lisa McGee who’ve forged their own path with their storytelling,” Róisín says. “Because of how incredibly hard they’ve worked, these funny, talented women have opened up a space which it’s possible for others to occupy. It occurred to me watching a clip of Big Mood the other night that I didn’t grow up seeing women in television in that way. It’s just brilliant.”

Róisín isn’t the only Norn Iron interloper in The Dry with Shiv’s dad, Tom, played by the brilliant Ciarán Hinds. “Ciarán’s terrible,” she deadpans. “He’s late all the time, he doesn’t know his lines, he’s rude. My back was broke carrying him… No, it was such a privilege to work with Ciarán Hinds. He makes it all seem so effortless, which of course it’s not. Ciarán has great energy and is one of those people that you’re just drawn to. It’s the same with Pom Boyd who plays Shiv’s mother Bernie. They both have that magnetism.”

Róisín also tickled funny bones last year in Sky Atlantic’s The Lovers, an odd couple sitcom which finds her zero-fucks-giving Belfast supermarket worker embarking on a torrid affair with a Partridge-esque English political journalist played by Johnny Flynn.

“If you think Shiv Sheridan swears a lot, wait till you meet Janet!” she says referring to her character in The Lovers. “I love her cheekiness, I love the fact she doesn’t have a filter and, most of all, I love that she’s unapologetically herself. Whether working-class, middle-class or whatever, we don’t need to dilute our stories or where we’re from. If we’re brave enough to say what’s on our minds and how we really feel about things, someone else in the audience is going to understand that and feel the same way and be grateful for us telling that story.”

Is it right that Róisín had never previously been in the parts of Loyalist East Belfast where much of The Lovers was shot?

“No, not with a name like mine,” she rues. “‘Throw us over another fada there!’ There never would have been a need for me to go to those places; that’s how separated this city is. It’s a shock to me that other people are shocked by that. Of course I haven’t been in this street before, why would I? You hear yourself say that and go, ‘Oh, that’s a bit odd, isn’t it!’ The people where we filmed were delighted, though, and really friendly. I suppose Belfast is well used to camera crews now and big stars being in restaurants having their Michelin star meals.”

While there’s little that can legally be said about Jeffrey Donaldson at this juncture, last month brought us the unexpected sights of Emma Little-Pengelly playing hurling with Michelle O’Neill at St. Paul’s GAA club in West Belfast and the Stormont power-sharers then attending a Northern Ireland game in Windsor Park.

“Yeah, brilliant!” Róisín beams. “As The Lovers’ writer David Ireland says, there’s more that unites us than divides us. That’s what he wanted to touch on in the series. Finally, we’ve got grown-up politicians playing together as well as working together.”

• Season two of The Dry is on ITVX now and coming soon to RTÉ. The Lovers is available for Sky Atlantic catch-up.

Read our interview with Róisín and more in our latest issue of Hot Press, available for purchase below: