Barry Ward

Barry Ward is an Irish Actor who has worked extensively in Theatre, Film and Television. He began his career at 14 years old in Roddy Doyle's highly acclaimed BBC drama, Family directed by Michael Winterbottom. He then went on to play a leading role in Paul Mercier's play Buddleia which enjoyed a successful run at the Dublin Theatre Festival before transferring to Donmar Warehouse, London. By the age of 16 he had completed a BBC six-part series Plotlands, directed by John Strickland and following this, he teamed up again with Mercier and actor Sean McGinley (Family) for award winning Irish language short Lipservice, soon after came his first feature Sunburn, shot in the U.S. featuring Cillian Murphy.

Barry has gone on to play a wide variety of roles across Theatre, Film and Television. He played the young lead opposite Peter Mullan in The Claim an international film featuring Milla Jovovic, Nastasia Kinski, and Sarah Polley. Barry starred in the Turner Classic Movie Short Film Award nominee Watchmen, alongside Cillian Murphy. He played Patrick Jones in the highly acclaimed Ch4 series City of Vice, and then opposite James McEvoy in the much feted BBC Film, MacBeth, as part of the Shakespeare re-told series. His most recent TV appearances include 4 episodes of Psych Ward for RTE's Storyland series. Other recent film credits include Shooting for Socrates and Blood Cells Bypass. His theatre credits include highly acclaimed productions of The Lieutenant of Inishmore at The RSC, Translations, The Plough and the Stars, Lay Me Down Softly, Whistle In The Dark, and Down The Line, at The Abbey Theatre.

This year Barry can be seen playing the lead role of Jimmy in the new and hotly anticipated Ken Loach film Jimmy's Hall.

Simone Kirby

Simone Kirby has recently finished filming on The Truth Commissioner, a feature film for BBC NI based on the novel by David Park, and Clean Break, a new 4 park drama for RTE playing Annette Rane. Both are due for release later this year.

She plays Tyva Hightopp, the Mad Hatters mother, in Disney's 'Alice Through the Looking Glass', due for release in May 2016. Simone plays Oonagh in Ken Loach's 'Jimmy's Hall', for which she was nominated as Lead Actress in Film at this year's IFTAs. Other credits in Film/TV are Irene in Peaky Blinders (BBC), Meet Your Neighbours (RTE), Love/Hate (RTE), Season Of The Witch (Lionsgate), X-Moor (Fyzz Facility), Single-Handed (RTE/UTV) and Geraldine in Pure Mule (RTE).

Simone has also worked extensively in Theatre; at The Abbey, The Old Vic, Shakespeare's Globe, The Gate Theatre, The Irish Rep (New York), and with Druid, Rough Magic, and many others. She was nominated for Best Actress at The Irish Theatre Awards for her performance as Mae, in Mud, with Corn Exchange.

Jim Norton

Jim Norton won a 2007 Olivier Award and a 2008 Tony Award for The Seafarer. His most recent appearance on Broadway has been as Candy in Of Mice and Men. Also on Broadway The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Finian's Rainbow and The Weir (Olivier Nomination). Other New York credits include Juno and the Paycock, Dublin Carol (Obie Award), Port Authority and Donmar production of The Night Alive, all at the Atlantic Theatre. National Theatre credits include The Veil, The Pillowman, Hamlet, Bedroom Farce, Comedians, St. Joan, Way Upstream, Tamburlaine The Great, Playboy of the Western World and Chorus of Disapproval. At the Royal Court he appeared in The Contractor and The Changing Room.

Film credits include: Boy, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Water For Elephants, Straw Dogs, Hidden Agenda, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, Driving Lessons, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Oyster Farmer, The Eclipse, and most recently Father Sheridan in Jimmy's Hall for Ken Loach. TV includes Elementary, Frasier, Poirot, Star Trek: the Next Generation, Stan, and BBC's River.

Aisling Franciosi

Aisling Franciosi is currently shooting season 2 of the TNT series Legends. She also stars opposite Jamie Dornan in the Netflix thriller series The Fall, for which she won the 2015 Irish Film & Television Award for Best Supporting Actress Drama. Previously, she received accolades for her performance opposite Gabriel Byrne in the BBC mini-series Quirke. Screen International selected her as one of their Stars of Tomorrow.

Brian F. O’Byrne

Brian F. O'Byrne was last seen on Broadway starring in John Patrick Shanley's OUTSIDE MULLINGAR at Manhattan Theater Club. His other theater credits include If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet, The Coast of Utopia, Doubt, Shining City, Frozen, Lonesome West, Beauty Queen of Leenane, Bedbound and his work with the inspiring Theater of War. He has been awarded the Tony (five nominations), Drama Desk (five nominations), Obie, Lucille Lortel, and Outer Critics Circle awards, among others. Television includes his Emmy-nominated role in "Mildred Pierce," "Prime Suspect," "FlashForward," "Brotherhood" and the acclaimed Irish series "Love/Hate."

Movies include the upcoming Jimmy's Hall directed by Ken Loach and Queen and Country directed by John Boorman (both of which premiered at 2014 Cannes Film Festival), as well as Medeas, Million Dollar Baby, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Brooklyn's Finest and The International. He will next be seen starring with David Duchovny in the NBC series "Aquarius" which will air this summer. Mr. O'Byrne was trained at the Samuel Beckett Centre at Trinity College Dublin and raised in Mullagh, County Cavan.

Francis Magee

Andrew Scott

James (Jimmy) Gralton is born in Effernagh, County Leitrim. His father Michael and mother Alice work a small farm of 25 acres of poor land. He has four sisters and two brothers, one who dies young. Two sisters emigrate to the US, two marry locally. His brother Charles stays at home on the farm. Emigration is a central fact of life in Leitrim in this era. The population more than halves through emigration in the second half of the 19th century. ‘Remittances’, the money sent back by emigrants, help to alleviate the widespread poverty in the area.

Aged 14, Jimmy leaves school and becomes a shop boy. He moves to Dublin and works as a barman before joining the British Army. Based in Scotland and later Cork. Refuses to go to India to defend ‘British imperialist interests’ and serves a year in prison. Deserts following his release and goes to England. Works as a docker in Liverpool and a miner in Wales. Then travels the world as a stoker on a steamer. Returns briefly to Ireland in 1907, before emigrating to New York, aged 21. Having worked at various jobs, Jimmy briefly joins the US Navy.

Gralton becomes politically active in New York. He is a member of Clan na Gael, the Irish-American support organisation for republicans in Ireland. He is influenced by the writings of James Connolly, the Irish socialist and republican who is executed for his role in the 1916 Easter Rising. Becomes active in the James Connolly Club in New York, established by Jim Larkin, a trade union leader and comrade of Connolly’s who moved to the US in 1914. Campaigns against the First World War and in support of an Irish Republic. He is an active trade unionist. In 1915 he applies for, and gets, US citizenship.

Following the 1916 Rising there is rapid political change in Ireland as radical nationalism and trade unionism grow. Sinn Féin and the Irish Volunteers are organised countrywide, including Leitrim. The attempted extension of conscription into the British Army to Ireland in 1918 is successfully resisted, in a campaign led by Sinn Féin and the labour movement. Sinn Féin sweeps the boards in most of Ireland in the 1918 general election following the end of the First World War. The labour movement is stronger than ever at the war’s end, but the Labour Party stands aside in the election to allow Sinn Féin a clear run. Meanwhile, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 offers hope to revolutionaries world-wide, and leads Gralton toward communism.

Sinn Fsil Eireann, an independent Irish parliament, and declares an Irish Republic. The British refuse to recognise it and the War of Independence commences. The Volunteers become the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Jimmy is involved in support work for the republican cause in New York. Meets President of the Irish Republic, Eamon de Valera, who travels to the US on a fundraising and propaganda mission. Joins the newly formed Communist Party in New York.

Black and Tans burn the Gowel Parochial Hall, the local, church-run ‘community centre’, to the ground.

The Black and Tans and Auxiliaries are sent by the British to take the war to the IRA and terrorise the communities that are seen to be supporting them. They attack civilians, trade unions, burn creameries and halls, towns and villages, and close down fairs and markets. The guerilla war of the IRA intensifies, mainly involving ambushes by ‘flying columns’. Meanwhile, a counterstate structure is created by the Dáil, including a court system. There is significant class conflict in town and country, and the republican leadership attempts to minimise it in pursuit of the single aim of driving out the British. Many court decisions favour the status quo.

Gralton returns to Leitrim in late June 1921 and joins the local IRA. He brings money for the cause and trains volunteers. A truce is declared weeks later on 11 July. Taking advantage of the temporary peace, Jimmy offers to establish a new community hall on his father’s land. It is built by voluntary local labour. The Pearse-Connolly Hall, named after two of the prominent executed leaders of the 1916 Rising, is opened on New Year’s Eve 1921. It is run by an elected committee, including Gralton, who is one of three trustees.

In 1920 the British government pass the Government of Ireland Act, which divides the island into Northern Ireland (the six north-eastern counties) and a twenty-six county Home Rule state called Southern Ireland. The independence movement rejects the act and fights on for a united independent republic, but the state of Northern Ireland is established in the summer of 1921. On 6 December representatives of the Dáil sign the Anglo- Irish Treaty with the British. This creates an Irish Free State as a British dominion. It consolidates partition and maintains an overseeing British presence in the southern state. This divides the independence movement and lead to civil war seven months later.

In May-June 1921 the miners at Arigna just over the border in Roscommon take over and work the mines for two months – the so-called ‘Arigna Soviet’. There are hundreds of ‘soviets’ in Ireland in these years, in creameries, factories, etc, but the conservative Labour leadership refuses to co-ordinate and lead workers’ rank-and-file militancy. In the countryside, the conservative republican leadership tries to minimise class conflict, as small farmers and rural labourers engage in land agitation.

Jimmy throws himself into land agitation. Courts are held in the Pearse- Connolly Hall to settle land disputes. A Direct Action Committee gives effect to court decisions and organises land seizures from landlords on behalf of tenants. Their actions lead to the area being dubbed the ‘Gowel Soviet’. The hall is also used for dances. Because it is outside the control of the church, it meets with extreme hostility from that powerful quarter. Gralton is condemned from the pulpit and rumours that the hall is frequented by prostitutes are circulated. Music and education classes are also held at the hall, which further infuriates the local Catholic Church, which seeks to monopolise schooling. The hall is a direct challenge to its power. Gralton describes it as ‘a sort of revolutionary community centre.’

In May 1922 Jimmy and the Direct Action Committee are confronted by Free State soldiers, supported by conservative anti-Treatyites and the local priest, as they reinstate an evicted tenant. They draw guns and the Free Staters back down. Church and state are united in their determination to drive out this ‘troublemaker’. Both the pro-Treaty Free Staters and conservative local anti-Treaty IRA leaders oppose the actions of Gralton and his committee. For landlords, large farmers and business people he represents a serious threat to their position. He is condemned from the altar and is arrested by Free State troops. Protests lead to his release. Troops come to arrest him again at the hall on 24 May 1922. Gralton escapes, is later caught and briefly jailed, but escapes and flees back to New York weeks before the outbreak of civil war.

Between January and June 1922 the independence movement is split in two on the issue of the Treaty. The Catholic Church, business leaders and the mainstream press all support the Treaty. The labour movement takes a neutral position, weakening the position of socialists like Gralton within the anti-Treaty movement. The IRA splits irrevocably in March 1922. There is jostling for position across the country as the British leave. In South Leitrim, the pro-Treaty (Free State) faction prevails, but there is little conflict. On 28 June the anti-Treaty IRA HQ in Dublin is shelled with British-supplied artillery by the newly formed National Army and the civil war begins. Though initially numerically stronger, the anti-Treaty IRA lacks strategy and a clear programme to rally support. It holds out in Munster until August 1922, but is eventually defeated by the National Army’s superior firepower and effectively surrenders in May 1923.

Jimmy spends the next decade back in New York, working at various jobs in an era of high employment. He is active again in Irish socialist-republican solidarity work, supporting campaigns in Ireland such as that by small farmers against the payment of land annuities to Britain. He remains active in the American labour and communist movements, though they are in decline as American capitalism goes through a boom period.

While church and state in an economically stagnant Ireland are creating a closed, repressive and exclusivist culture that frowns on and censors modern dancing, jazz music, Hollywood films and popular culture in general, Jimmy is living in the economically buoyant and culturally vibrant New York of the ‘roaring twenties’. New skyscrapers reach to the stars, African-Americans become prominent in the arts and music, especially jazz, which is popularised through the new mass medium of radio and the burgeoning record industry. Dance clubs proliferate and new dances like the Charleston and the Shim Sham are born. In New York and other big cities there is an unprecedented mixing of different ethnic groups, and a loosening of the moral strictures that are being copper-fastened in Ireland.

The roaring twenties come to an abrupt end with the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Mass unemployment and poverty hit the US from 1930. Jimmy and his communist comrades are temporarily energised, believing this to be the beginning of the end of capitalism. They are involved in organising the unemployed, fighting evictions and championing African-American rights. He stays in touch with events in Ireland, and sends regular subscriptions to support the new communist newspaper, the Irish Workers’ Voice, and various workers’ struggles.

In Ireland the pro-Treaty wing of Sinn Féin, now called Cumann na nGaedheal, is in government from 1922 to 1932. Anti-treaty Sinn Féin and the IRA maintain their organisations and refuse to accept the legitimacy of either the Irish Free State or Northern Ireland. In alliance with the Catholic Church, the right-wing Free State government creates a very conservative society, characterised by censorship and repression. Economic structures remain untouched, policies favour big farmers who export cattle, and the urban working class and rural poor fare badly. The Labour Party is a weak and ineffectual opposition. In 1926 Eamon de Valera and his followers split from Sinn Féin, which refuses to take its seats in parliament, and forms Fianna Fáil, which takes the oath of fidelity to the British crown that had been a major plank of republican opposition to the Treaty and enters the Dáil in 1927. They take advantage of the weakness of the Labour Party and the left and attract the support of workers and small farmers.

The IRA begins to shift to the left, but still has a significant conservative, Catholic tendency. Republicans join with the new Irish communist movement in a range of campaigns and groups sponsored by the Comintern (the Soviet-Union backed international communist movement), including a radical campaign against the payment of land annuities to Britain.

In the depression following the 1929 Wall Street Crash of 1929, these radical campaigns gather momentum. In 1931 the IRA adopts a socialist platform called ‘Saor Éire’. This sparks a massive red scare and church/ state backlash. The IRA and a range of communist and radical groups are banned, the Catholic Church warns people about joining such ‘sinful’ organisations, and thousands are jailed. Fianna Fáil, promising to stop paying land annuities to Britain and to release the prisoners, among a range of other policies that appeal to the working class and rural poor, wins power in the February 1932 general election. Cumann na nGaedheal has tried to tar them with the red scare brush, but the party makes clear its Catholic credentials and reassures Irish capitalists about its intentions. Its economic protectionist policies are a major boon to Irish business interests. Fianna Fáil remains in government uninterrupted until 1948.

Jimmy’s brother Charles, who has been running the farm, dies. In March 1932 Gralton takes advantage of the new era in Ireland, with its short-lived atmosphere of hope, progress and political freedom, including a new communist party in the offing, to return home and help his aged parents. He immediately sets about establishing a Revolutionary Workers’ Group in his area, as part of the network of such groups that would form the basis of a new communist party. He briefly joins Fianna Fáil in an apparent effort to force some investment into the area, but is soon expelled. His group attends demonstrations, local and national, and sells copies of the Workers’ Voice. Meanwhile, he works the farm.

A number of local youngsters approach him to re-open the hall. Despite his reluctance to stir up his old enemies –the Church, local big farmers and businessmen and antisocialist, conservative elements in the IRA, as well as the Special Branch (political police) – he eventually agrees, and forms a committee to run it. Classes and meetings and dances resume. His old enemies revive their demonization campaign. Youngsters are warned to stay away from Jimmy’s Hall by the local clergy, who denounce him as a dangerous communist and agent of Satan. Names are taken of those who attend dances. The leader of the local IRA unit is hostile; stones are thrown at Gralton’s house, hay is burnt and Jimmy is physically threatened. The formation of the fascistic Army Comrades Association adds to the menace. The local parish priest demands that the hall be handed over to the Church. The hall committee invite him to join the board of trustees, but he refuses.

In August, at the request of progressive IRA men from nearby Roscommon who have taken up the case, Jimmy makes a radical speech at the reinstatement of evicted tenants at the Earl of Kingston’s estate.

In October, the British communist Thomas Mann, who has come to support the agitation against unemployment, is deported from Northern Ireland. The local parish priest in Gowel says in a sermon that all communists should be deported.

On 27 November 1932 shots are fired into the hall during a dance. Band and dancers hit the floor and no-one is injured. The band play on and the people dance defiantly into the early hours. A landmine explodes near the hall in early December, and on Christmas Eve 1932 it is burnt to the ground.

Fianna Fáil witholds the payment of land annuities to Britain in June 1932 and sparks off a tariff war that impacts most heavily on cattle-exporting big farmers. IRA support for Fianna Fáil in the election has led to the formation of the Army Comrades Association (ACA), former Free State Army veterans under the leadership of the deposed head of the Garda Siochána, the fascist Eoin O’Duffy. The ACA grows in strength with the support of the disaffected ranchers, and becomes increasingly fascistic, adopting the blue-shirt uniform by which they will be known in early 1933. Strict censorship of films (1923-) is followed by a draconian Censorship of Publications Act in 1929. Bishops and clergy condemn modern dancing, ‘jazz’, motor cars and ‘immodest fashions’. In 1935 the Dancehalls Act brings dancehalls under strict, usually Catholic Church, supervision and control. The Catholicisation of the new state is crowned in June 1932 when Ireland hosts the Eucharistic Congress, a huge international event that firmly establishes Fianna Fáil’s Catholic credentials. Jimmy’s sister Mary Ann, a nun in New York, travels to Ireland with thousands of others for the occasion. The IRA, in the meantime, is in the process of distancing itself from communism and left-wing politics generally, which leads to a split in 1934 with the formation of the left-wing Irish Republican Congress.

On 1 February 1933 Jimmy’s father Michael dies. Two days later the police call to Gralton’s farm to serve Jimmy with a deportation order; he is given one month to leave the country (he is described as ‘an undesirable person’ – his US citizenship provides the basis for the order.) Jimmy escapes and goes on the run. A local and national campaign against the deportation – co-ordinated by the Gralton Defence Committee – is launched. It is supported by communists, socialists, republicans, trade unionists and writers. On 5 March a local church-gate meeting in support of Gralton is attacked by a priest-led mob, and the speakers, including prominent novelist and socialist republican Peadar O’Donnell, are driven out of the area. At a meeting of Leitrim County Council in July 1933 Jimmy’s mother Alice addresses the councillors, condemning the deportation order and appealing for their support, to no avail. On 10 August 1933, after six months on the run, Jimmy is finally arrested at the house of a poteen-maker near Mohill, County Leitrim. He is taken to Ballinamore barracks and the following day to Cork Jail. The next day he is put on board the Britannic at Cobh and sent to New York, with only the clothes he is wearing. His ticket is bought with money that was found on him when arrested. He is greeted by comrades as he disembarks in New York.

He will never return to Ireland.

Fianna Fáil was initially dependant on the support of the Labour Party to govern, and in late January 1933 called a snap general election and succeeded in gaining an overall majority. The final act of the party’s first Minister for Justice James Geoghegan was to sign the deportation order against Gralton. Geoghegan was a barrister and long-time Catholic activist. It is probable that he was a member of the Knights of Columbanus, a network of lay Catholic professionals and businessmen who were vehemently anti-socialist, and that it was through this channel that the plan for Jimmy’s deportation was hatched and executed, the idea having been formed following the deportation of Thomas Mann from Northern Ireland in October 1932.

Jimmy Gralton immediately throws himself back into political activism in New York. He becomes the main driving force of the Communist Party- backed Irish Workers’ Clubs (IWC) and of the Communist Party’s (CP) Irish-related activities. The IWC supports left-wing struggles in Ireland and also organises Irish immigrants into unions and around various social and political issues in the US. In October 1933 Gralton stands unsuccessfully as a CP candidate in the New York Borough elections. He works at various jobs, and for a time runs a small food business. His last job is with a local radio station in New York. Jimmy marries Bessie Cronogue, from Drumsna, County Leitrim, shortly before his death on 29 December 1945. He is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.