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As an Irish-based actress in London, Felicity Hayes-McCoy possessed considerable ingenuity: to ensure she would have a more reliable and frequent income, she began to write scripts in which she was best suited to portray the characters.
“The cunning plan was to put Irish-language words in the script and that way they employed me to be the reader.Fierce cunning: you got paid both ways, you got paid as the writer and as the reader,” laughs Felicity about her crafty plan.
“After a couple of years where, really I was writing material that I was playing myself, I wrote a script and I wasn’t free to play in it. So the thing split in two, as a writer and as an actor. Then the writing took over.”
As she began to write more, Felicity found that her once extremely busy life as an actress was becoming much calmer.With this slower pace, she and her husband, English opera director Wilf Judd, decided to split their time between London and a region that has always held a special place in Felicity’s heart, Ballyferriter outside Dingle.
Two worlds or one
Dividing time between the hustle and bustle of London and the rugged beauty of Kerry, it seems obvious to ask is there a stark contrast between living in the two places. Interestingly, it turns out there are more similarities than you might think.
“It’s really weird, but the answer is no – or rather the answer is yes and no. Obviously if you are sitting looking out a window at mountains, there are sheep up on the hill and you can smell the sea. It’s not the same as looking out a window in London.
So physically they are very different, but the strange thing is, really there is a community sense around Burmondsey in London city that reminds me strongly of the small communities back here.
"An awful lot of people there, their families would have worked on the river or in factories around for generations. You can go into a pub in Burmondsey and almost feel that you are in Ballyferriter.”
How the author came to love the west Kerry Gaeltacht goes back to her university years. As a born-and-bred Dubliner, when Felicity was awarded a scholarship to spend time in the Gaeltacht while studying Irish in University College Dublin (UCD), she had not spent any significant time in rural Ireland before.
“I came down on the train to Tralee, I got the bus out to Dingle and I got the bus back west again, literally with a bit of paper in my hand that had the name of my ban an tí on it,” recalls Felicity.
“I had been on country holidays, but I had never been on my own staying in the countryside. I was kind of scared. I remember being really, really scared of the dark. I was used to street lights, so it was strange and it was absolutely wonderful. I just fell in love with the place.
Finfarran
In years to come, this experience was to be pivotal, as ultimately the landscape around Dingle was the inspiration for her Finfarran series of books. The fourth of which, The Month of Borrowed Dreams, came out last week.
The novels explore the life of protagonist Hanna, who moves back to her hometown in the west of Ireland after years of living in London, having found out that her barrister husband was having an affair. In The Month of Borrowed Dreams, Hanna is starting to settle back into rural living when everything is uprooted again by a surprise arrival.
Although Felicity’s novels draw heavily on her experience in Kerry, Finfarran is not necessarily based there. “The Finfarran peninsula, which is the kind of makey-uppy peninsula the book is all about, isn’t a Gaeltacht area,” she explains.
“It’s a fictional peninsula that is probably somewhere between Clare, Kerry and Cork. It’s absolutely not like living down here, except in so far as it’s an area of rural Ireland where there is that balance between what is happening in tourism and what is happening in the local industries of fishing and agriculture.”
Although Felicity is now well settled in Ballyferriter and blends in with the locals, she says there is still no doubt that she is a blow-in. This is not something that she is upset about, but is in fact happy, as it is her outsider-insider status that has facilitated the perspective she needs for writing her books, allowing her to share the land outside her window with the world.
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