Mary-Elaine Tynan Don Wycherley The Life and Times of Paddy Armstrong Mum from the Glen Road, all siblings were born in Belfast, she grew up in Dublin, spent her childhood in Belfast and Cushendall. She says that although she sounds like a Dub, she’s a Belfast woman. I went to school in Dublin and I had a music teacher who was single at the time who then just after I left school married Paddy Armstrong. I became a teacher years later and ended up working with her but I was also writing at the time (I worked with Paddy’s wife Caroline)> Gerard Conlon died in 2017 ? and basically I interviewed Paddy (didn’t really trust the media) Paddy was very media shy, he’s not like Gerry and Paul, he’s a very shy person. When Paddy got out of prison, he couldn’t cope. He was too afraid to go back to Belfast because he was afraid that someone was going to put a bullet in him because he thought that people still thought that he was guilty because what the British judicial system did when they got out they started a whispering campaign that they got out on a technicality. So Paddy was really media shy, so when I met up with him, so when Gerry Conlon died his wife said to me the media are starting to ask for interviews, and I was working for the Sunday independent at the time and she said would you interview him and I said of course, and it was the first interview he did in about 20 years. Based on that we decided to make a documentary, I was working with RTÉ radio at the time (think it was the 25th anniversary of their release).To make the doc we went back to England and went back to Guildford where he had never been until he was arrested, we went back to London where he had been squatting, we went back to the Old Bailey, and we formed a really strong relationship and on the basis of that he asked me to write his memoir and I said no way, I can not take the responsibility, it’s too important a story and I don’t feel qualified to do it. (Agreed) worked on it for the next year and it was a really hard process because Paddy is so shy and only tells the funny stories. He only likes to talk about making prison hooch, having the craic and all the mad stuff, he doesn’t want to talk about the dark stuff like being put in solitary. So it ended up I’d have to interview people who he was in prison with like this guy called Ronnie McCartney who was an IRA man from Belfast who was in prison at the same time at Paddy and was very good to Paddy. The IRA lads were very good to Paddy because they knew he wasn’t one of them and they also saw how soft and gentle he was. Paddy nearly got himself into a lot of trouble in prison because he was a target, you know. He was so shocked when he was in prison, he hadn’t a clue how to cope, so they looked after him and Ronnie in particular looked after him. So I interviewed people like Ronnie for the book. (Also interview Paddy’s solicitor Alastair Logan and prisoner officers._The play is based on the book. So the play we picked key moments out of the memoir and they’re dramatized. I was approached to write a play for the 50th anniversary. I had no idea how to write a play. When I got asked by a local theatre in Clontarf in Dublin. Friend who works for RTE helped her write the first draft and after that I looked for an actor and I had only one guy in mind and it was Don Wycherley because I saw him on the staff in The Abbey and he eventually agreed to work with me on it and he was very non committal and we began working through the draft we had and he read the memoir twice and he felt very strongly that this was a story that could be told on stage, And he and I worked on it and rewrote it together over a year and we ended up with the stage play two years ago that became the play that has now been touring for the last two years. Everything in the play, even though they’re dramatized, they’re Paddy’s words.If people are afraid that it’s going to be grim and dark, it is that, but it is also really funny, because Paddy is hilarious. He’s got that black Belfast sense of humour. Don plays all the various different people through the eyes of Paddy. I think it works really well as a one man show.I felt such a responsibility to tell Paddy’s story, to do it justice after such an injustice was done to him. I also wanted people to remember him and know him in a way that most people don’t. They felt like they know Gerry through In The Name of The Father and through various other things that Gerry did over the years. They didn’t know Paddy and I wanted them to know Paddy, the man who had this awful injustice but is so much more than this. He is hilarious and forgiving and kind and he’s loving. People have been so moved by it. We had people last night who have seen it for the third and fourth time. We’re going back to the Lyric because we sold out last time in the Naughton Studio, we are bringing it back to the main stage. (Been around Ireland and England with Paddy’s story, going to US and Edinburgh next year.) Dublin audiences, unless they’re from the North, it’s a story to them and they invest in it as a piece of theatre and they love it. Northern audiences sometimes they are watching something that they remember. Northern audiences they go quiet and they first show in the Lyric it was really disarming because Don, who is on the stage, he’s talking his energy from the audience, and he’s going ‘they’ve gone deftly silence, they don’t like it’ but they’re listening intently and they’re feeling it and they’re remembering, but they laugh in the right places and they gasp in the right places, but the feelings are different and the experiences are different and they jumped up at the end and gave an amazing response. But in England it’s a different experience again because often there are people who went through what it was like to be Irish in England in the seventies. And they’re kind of retraumatised. One woman told us that she was in London when it all happened and she was walking by a park and she got pulled into the park and got raped. She had red hair and freckles and looked very Irish and the Irish were persona non grata at the time so she couldn’t go to the police because she felt that she wouldn’t be believed and she said that was what it was like to be Irish in London in the seventies and eighties. You couldn’t be safe being Irish so she never reported that crime. She said I know this play is about Paddy but it is also about what it was like to be Irish at a certain period in history. And she said this has given me comfort.To me it has been the greatest honour of my career to tell this story because it means different things to different people and it’s a true privilege and I ask people to come and see it.
