What have you got to say for yourself?

I first met Margaretta d’Arcy around the age of 12, when she and John Arden stored the sets from one of their plays at a holiday home in Portumna my father shared with Tom Kilroy.

Years later I shot these portraits of them for a piece on married couples in The Sunday Telegraph Magazine. Even though I did both portraits in the same room, they refused on principle to appear in the same picture as they weren't actually living together. Margaretta filmed me as I photographed her, and when we were finished took me up to the attic where there was a tangle of wires hanging from a bare bulb in the ceiling. She flicked a switch, thrust a microphone into my face and said "You are now broadcasting live on the world's only Irish language, feminist pirate radio station - what have you got to say for yourself?"

Not a lot, as it turned out.

I last met her in 2019, when she and filmmaker Eaven Aiken were passing through Paris on their way to Spain. Eaven was making a radio documentary about her - I hope it gets aired at some point.

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Trans / Punk

I shot some portraits recently of Irish transgender people for Michele-Ann Kelly’s Transition, Family and Me project. When Sarah R Phillips and I started talking about music it turned out we’d both been to many of the seminal punk gigs in Dublin. I asked if she’d seen the legendary Slaughter & The Dogs play in Belfield, and she told me not only was she there, she still goes to see them every chance she gets. Respect.