Feisty, studious, wistful and a pure ‘wee tout’… meet the REAL Derry Girls – the childhood friends who inspired Lisa McGee’s hit sitcom based on her teenage years of growing up in Northern Ireland
It’s an exhibition that celebrates Derry’s most famous five – Erin who dreams of being a writer, wild child Michelle, worrying and studious Clare, wacky Orla and the Wee English Fella.
Based in the Tower Museum, the Derry Girls exhibition has just opened and is fast becoming yet another tourist attraction in the city enjoying a boost because of the Channel 4 show’s international success. But on opening night, among the various artefacts like Erin’s diary and Aunt Sarah’s pyjamas, were some women who knew these characters better than all of us.
Writer Lisa McGee did, after all, base the series on her own teenage years growing up in Derry and it has been an open secret in the city as to who her characters are based on. And to help raise publicity for the exhibition, the real Derry Girls finally stepped into the spotlight.
Aoife O’Neill can remember meeting Lisa McGee at Thornhill College, the local Catholic girls grammar school, for the first time.
‘I met Lisa in third year,’ says the now 42-year-old. ‘She sat next to me in Irish class and I always remember the first time I spoke to her because she had a pencil case with her name on it at a time when you wouldn’t have really seen personalised things so it was really swanky.
Aoife O’Neill also known as Clare pictured left and Shauna Bray also known as Michelle pictured right
‘From then on and to this day we are great friends and we have all stayed in contact.’
Aoife says that even back then Lisa was determined to be a writer.
‘Lisa is a really proud Derry girl and I think it bothered her when she went to university in Belfast and then moved to England that in all the acting circles when she said she was from Derry the only pictures in people’s minds were the Troubles,’ she says.
Lisa had always loved Derry and had spent her youth with a notebook, writing down things that happened and phrases that made her laugh. Her friends were well-used to seeing the notebook come out of her handbag on a night out.
For Lisa’s pal Shauna Bray it was no surprise then that the plays Lisa was writing in their theatre studies classes began to win awards. Her friendship with Lisa began when Shauna came back to Thornhill to repeat her exams and found herself in the same drama class as the writer.
‘I was taken aback because all of us were going out on a Saturday night and scraping the pennies together to buy a bottle of Frosty Jacks and Lisa was at home watching Newsnight Review to find out about theatre and TV,’ says Shauna. ‘I was thinking, “who is this one and where did she come out of?” Then I started reading the plays she was writing and I just thought, “this girl is amazing”.’
As Lisa’s success grew, her friends knew she was still looking for that perfect story about Derry.
‘When the first series came about we got invited to the premiere,’ says Aoife. ‘It was a quiet event — a Monday at 1.30pm or something in the cinema at the bowling alley. Most of the girls were working but I was able to go so me and two of the others went.
Actress Jamie-Lee O’Donnell (left) and mayor Patricia Logue (right) in Quinn’s kitchen
The Derry Girls Experience will be in the Tower Museum until July next year
‘They showed us the first two episodes and we just knew from the minute we saw it that it was cracker. ‘I knew Derry people would get it and that other people would love it but I never would have imagined it would have been such a phenomenon worldwide. I can remember going up to her and saying, “I better not be that wee tout”,’ laughs Aoife.
Shauna says she immediately knew who each girl was based on.
‘We had no idea were going to be characters,’ she says. ‘In the first scene when Erin is meeting Clare, I could tell immediately that Erin was Lisa and Clare was Aoife and then as soon as Michelle came on I thought, “ah right, okay, there she is.” With Orla, we have another friend Sarah Strawbridge and I knew it had to be her. She is a kind of a mixture of Orla and Aunt Sarah.
‘We saw the first two episodes and I had this real excitement because I knew it was going to be huge and would make Lisa a household name. We always knew how good she was and how talented and we thought “now everybody else is going to know what we know.” I’m actually getting goosebumps talking about it again.’
Shauna was delighted to see the incarnation of her teenage self up on screen.
‘When I first saw Michelle I was over the moon because Lisa had actually written a character based on me. I didn’t know how people were going to take her, so I kept quiet but then Michelle started to get really popular and everyone loved her so I told everybody, “that’s me!”
‘It’s a running joke with my sister — if I meet a new group of people she will say to me, “Have you told them yet?”‘
As the series took legs, the TV company didn’t want the girls to reveal themselves as the inspiration for the characters for their own protection, but in Derry it was an open secret.
The broken statue from Sister Michael’s office in the he global hit Channel Four comedy, Derry Girls
With each week as the stories were revealed, the real Derry Girls also saw their lives being played out in real time too.
‘We got to see the first two episodes at each premiere and after that we watched it on TV the same as everyone else,’ says Aoife. ‘The only time I got any kind of heads up was when we were at a Legenderry Ladies Lunch,’ says Aoife about when Clare told her friends she was gay. ‘Lisa said, “Aoife, something is going to happen with Clare this week and it’s definitely not based on you.” Everyone who knows you would know it’s your character so lucky for Lisa I was engaged to be married at the time,’ says Aoife, laughing at the memory. ‘I came into work the next day and all everyone wanted to know was if I had a wee lesbian phase but the answer is no! That’s the only time there was ever any heads up that I got that something would appear.’
A lot of the time the life stories in the show might not necessarily reflect that particular character as things have been chopped, changed and exaggerated.
‘My mammy has passed away now but one of the other girls, Sarah, her daddy died while we were at school and that would have been the main basis for Clare’s daddy dying,’ says Aoife.
‘My daddy wasn’t spotted up Pump Street but after my mammy died he went to Medjugorje on a pilgrimage and met a woman and we were none too pleased,’ she says of her siblings.
‘When that appeared in the show Lisa’s mammy rang her up and said, “Aoife’s going to kill you”. Lisa said she didn’t think it was that obvious but told me she thought it was hilarious the way we went on when my daddy met someone.’
That night her dad and his wife actually rang and laughed with Aoife about what was on the show, knowing that the grief his children felt was for their lovely mammy.
‘My daddy knows himself that it was a natural reaction,’ Aoife says.
Erin’s diary and Aunt Sarah’s pyjamas are among the items displayed at the experience
And she is still amazed at how well-loved Derry Girls is and is so proud of her friend’s international success.
‘When the exhibition opened a couple of weeks ago and when Lisa was given the Freedom of the City we were all there thinking how brilliant it was,’ she says. ‘It’s so well deserved and Lisa has worked so hard all her life on what she does. To see her reaping such rewards has been amazing.’
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Now a mother of four children aged between nine and 15, Shauna is so proud of Jamie-Lee O’Donnell for capturing what she calls her ‘feral gremlin energy’. She says that if people thought Michelle was wild on screen, they’d go pale if they knew what she and Lisa got up to at university.
‘I was absolutely a wild child like Michelle,’ she says, laughing. ‘If Lisa wrote about the university years you would say that Michelle had been tamed down for the TV. I was clean, stone mad. There’s still a bit of madness in there and it comes out every so often.’
The women grew up at a time before the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland but they feel the TV show is a good indication of what life was like for them.
‘Our parents did an amazing job bringing us up during that time, when there was so much death and devastation,’ says Shauna. ‘But our main concerns were boys, getting to the chip shop on a Friday night, going out and enjoying ourselves. I think that’s what Lisa has done really well in the show. When you are a teenager, you are your main focus, you don’t think about the madness that’s going on around you.
‘Michelle just floats along,’ says Shauna. ‘All she is worried about are her baps looking well.’
Aoife is 42 and she and her husband Ruairi have a 16-year-old girl called Erin, a name that Lisa always loved. Fictional Clare would be delighted to know that Aoife has grown up to be a retreat facilitator for the Carmelite order of nuns in Derry’s Termonbacca.
‘I did social work and policy in university,’ says Aoife. ‘I wanted to be a social worker but I changed my mind — I’m too soft for that. I ended up working in Marks & Spencer for a few years and then went into youth ministry working for the diocese. For the last two years I’ve been employed by the Carmelites as a retreat coordinator and a youth officer.’
With each week as the stories were revealed, the real Derry Girls also saw their lives being played out in real time too
It might be hard to imagine Michelle working in corporate finance but Shauna did that for a while.
‘Me and Lisa did the same degree course at Queens, a BA honours in drama and I have to say we had the best three years of our lives,’ Shauna says. ‘I was an actor and I was supposed to go on and study acting professionally. I had got a place in the Gaiety School of Acting and I gave it up because I’d met my partner and my head was turned.
‘I went into investment management working in compliance. The girls used to say: “There she is, Chandler Bing” because no one knew exactly what I did. I wasn’t following my passion and it wasn’t really me but then, having four children relatively close together, I stopped working and I have been a stay-at-home mum for the past ten years or so.
‘Myself, Lisa and Sarah went to Las Vegas in November. The night before we flew out we were staying in Lisa’s house in Belfast and she practically cornered me in the kitchen and told me I had to go back to acting.
‘I kept saying I couldn’t as, you know, you’re in your forties and you have no confidence, but she fried my head that much that she actually talked me into it.
‘I have just been accepted back into the Gaiety School of Acting to study for the next year. It’s amazing, I can’t actually believe it, it’s very exciting, especially at this age. Everything is changing again — the feral gremlin energy is back!’
Having grown up together, the Derry Girls are still close friends, sharing a Whatsapp group and getting together when they can.
‘I couldn’t imagine life without them,’ says Aoife. ‘No matter what, through all the times in my life, the birth of my daughter, the death of my mother, my wedding day, the highs and lows and all of life’s challenges, they have been there. I couldn’t imagine all those circumstances without the girls being there. I couldn’t do it without them.’
As the exhibition in Derry’s Tower Museum reveals their lives too, Aoife has only great memories. ‘It’s such a gift that Lisa has given us,’ she says. ‘Everyone has memories of their childhood to look back and laugh at but for us they are recorded. For us, Derry Girls brings back so many memories and it is the most priceless gift anyone could give you, the best days of your life, those teenage years at school recorded in that way.’
So, now that she has been forever immortalised on the small screen, what advice would Shauna give her teenage self?
‘I would say, stick with it, keep on doing what you do, don’t calm down, stay as crazy as you are — which is probably not great advice to be honest,’ Shauna says, laughing. ‘But be who you are, be true to yourself and you’re going to be grand.’
- The Derry Girls Experience will be in the Tower Museum until July 2024. Pre-book tickets online at towermuseumcollections.com
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