Des McAleer plays Ned Hanlon

Set in Northern Ireland during World War Two, My Mother and Other Strangers follows the fortunes of the Coyne family and their neighbours as they struggle to maintain a normal life after a huge United States Army Air Force (USAAF) airfield, with 4,000 service men and women, lands in the middle of their rural parish.

Published: 2 November 2016
There is something about this kind of world, the Irish country-life, presented not as a romantic fairy story but with a sense of lived reality, which I think is not something often recorded, especially in the North of Ireland.
— Des McAleer

Who are the Hanlon family?

The Hanlon family are fishermen on the shores of Lough Neagh, whose ancestral homestead was razed to make way for an American air base. They have been compelled to move to a nearby cottage, displaced, and feel deeply aggrieved. Nothing can compensate for the loss of the place where their previous generations have lived. Ned, my character, is a widower, left with two boys to rear. They are coarse, rough people, if the truth was told, and of course they contrast with the rather more delicate, well-bred family, the Coynes, who are a little bit more middle-class and refined.

What do you feel is at the heart of the story?

It is the eternal love triangle of a woman in a marriage that has gone a bit stale, living in an environment she finds uncongenial and alien. Rose, the English wife of a local publican, is alive to poetry and the life of the imagination. She meets a rather glamourous, literary American Captain. They find they have an intellectual, emotional spark that develops into a passion. Suddenly, a woman who is a stickler for justice, right-thinking and right-living, finds herself in a shadowy world of betrayal and duplicity in her domestic life. It mirrors the political complications in the society around her where everything is rather ambivalent and compromised by issues such as whether or not to smuggle goods to obtain a luxury and undermine the ration system, that kind of shady misdemeanour which she disapproves of so much. And also the larger question of war-time partisanship or neutrality. Barry captures the local community so brilliantly, the way of speech and talk, and yet understands the eternal passions of a woman who has an emotional hunger that is not being fulfilled.

What appealed to you about the project?

I love this project, first of all, because it captures the world of my parents. A rural Ulster community which is beautifully evoked in this, and I love their way of speech and thinking. But also because I no longer live here. I live over the water so it gives me the chance to come home and reconnect with that entire world again which I miss. There is something about this kind of world, the Irish country-life, presented not as a romantic fairy story but with a sense of lived reality, which I think is not something often recorded, especially in the North of Ireland. The actual Ulster farming community after partition is a neglected area in drama, despite being the focus of writers like McGahern and Heaney. Those conjunctions of the American, glamourous, ‘we are the new masters of the universe’, the fading British Empire, and the shifting in the political allegiances of this little parochial community is fascinating.

What would you like the audience to take away from the series?

It evokes a rather important period but it also vividly portrays an insular community living through a period of global change and danger. Viewers will get a great love story, unusual characters, a setting evoked fantastically and they’ll get an historical period which is intriguing and fascinating. I hope people really connect with it because it takes my breath away.

Cast

  • Rose Coyne - Hattie Morahan
  • Michael Coyne - Owen McDonnell
  • Captain Ron Dreyfuss - Aaron Staton
  • Emma Coyne - Eileen O’Higgins
  • Francis Coyne - Michael Nevin
  • Voice of older Francis Coyne - Ciaran Hinds
  • Ned Hanlon - Des McAleer
  • Davey Hanlon - Seamus O’Hara
  • Mickey Joe Hanlon - Ryan McParland
  • Failey - Kerr Logan
  • Barney Quinn - Gavin Drea
  • Sally Quinn - Fiona O’Shaugnessy
  • Ellen Quinn - Maggie Cronin
  • Kettie Brady - Antonia Campbell-Hughes
  • Seamie Brady - Isaac Heslip
  • Doctor Black - Charles Lawson
  • Andrew Black - Ruairi O’Connor
  • Jemmy Fox - Frank McCafferty
  • Nellie Fox - Christina Nelson
  • Tillie Ziegler - Kate Phillips