DEIRDRE Gribbin is a world renowned composer from Andersonstown and has provided the score for Margo Harkin’s seminal documentary ‘Stolen’, about Ireland’s mother and baby homes.

Speaking about the score for the film which featured in the Docs Ireland festival at QFT, Deirdre said the music was difficult to compose because of the emotional power of the documentary and the subject matter.

“It was a hard one to write the music for. I knew the subject but I didn’t realise the extent of it and that was the most shocking thing," she told the Andersonstown News.

“It’s a long film but Margo [Harkin] didn’t want to cut anyone out and wanted all of their voices to be heard. There are some scenes I love, such as the use of the the tableau of poems throughout which create some very strong scenes, and Margo asked me to write a specific piece of music for the ending that would be a reverie; a moment to just think about it all. I think her film was very beautifully done.

“Margo had heard some of my music and I mostly work in the live classical music arena with orchestras and string quartets. I have done film before, I did the score for Richard Harris’ last film ‘My Kingdom’ which was based on Shakespeare’s King Lear and a few documentaries.

“I really wanted to do acoustic music for this film and I wrote it with a string quartet and a wonderful Irish uilleann piper called Matt Bashford and the music just came together.”

Deirdre said a lot of her subject matter and her music has been influenced by growing up in West Belfast during the conflict and she spoke about her family who still live in Andersonstown.

“A lot of my subject matter was influenced by growing up off the Andersonstown Road and it’s really influenced a lot of my work. When I moved to England I realised a lot people didn’t know about it and that really gave me a chance to put a perspective on what was my lived experience.

“A lot of my family still live in Belfast, my father still lives in the Ladybrook area and he’s 93. He came over to see me recently but wouldn’t let me meet him at the airport and insisted on getting the tube in on his own! He’s also the Sacristan for St Michael’s and he came to see Stolen when it was released. Unlike some people his age he didn’t dismiss what the film was talking about and he said it was a big eye-opener into what had happened.”

MUSIC: Deidre has been setting her son Ethan's poems to music with the Irish Chamber Orchestra
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MUSIC: Deidre has been setting her son Ethan's poems to music with the Irish Chamber Orchestra

Deirdre said she believes that once the film has been widely seen that it will be a very important examination of what happened at mother and baby homes in Ireland.

“I think it is the most thorough examination of the issue of mother and baby homes. There is a lot of work which has been done on the Magdalene laundries but this is different. These women had their children taken away from them."

Deirdre also said the film personally affected her after seeing the evidence in the film which shows that a lot of the children who died at the mother and baby homes had disabilities.

“My son Ethan has Down Syndrome and in the film you see a lot of the babies who died had some form of disability. That really resonates with me, my son is 17 now and at college studying hospitality and he is doing fantastic.

"He is such a positive force in the world and when you see what happened in these homes of the hiddenness, of getting rid of things that they didn’t want others to see. That was a very emotional pull on writing the music."

Deirdre is currently working on a range of music including an orchestral piece called ‘Ogham’ for RTÉ for New Music Dublin Festival in 2024. One of Deirdre’s other pieces of work is Hearing Your Genes Evolve which premiered in February 2023. It is based on the work of her friend, Dr Sarah Teichmann, a world-renowned geneticist whom she met whilst on a fellowship at Cambridge University, but it is also based on her son.

Deirdre said: “When he was born the information was so scant. They handed me a photocopied leaflet which said he wouldn’t live long and might not be able to talk. He has proved all of that wrong now. I wanted to write music to find out what it meant to have a genetic anomaly and I wrote it based on the patterning of the genetic code.

“The piece got used in a documentary about whether depression was genetic and the filmmaker used it. We also performed the piece at the Science Festival in Belfast and my son came and was part of the talk.”

Other work Deidre has been focusing on has been putting some of the poems her son has written to music, as well as music based around the Kindertransport and the poems of Lotte Kramer who was 14 when she fled Nazi Germany and is now turning 100-years-old. 

“I have been working with the Irish Chamber Orchestra and we’re putting some of my son’s poems to music," said Deirdre. "He writes the most amazing poems and we’re going to be recording some next year. I have also been recently working on a piece about the Kindertransport which is based on the poems of Lotte Kramer who was saved by it when she was 14. 

“She is now turning 100 and that was very emotional to work on. My husband is Jewish and thinking about what the Nazis did and their policies as well towards the disabled really affected how I wrote the music.”