https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/stage/2023/07/08/weve-got-to-get-these-fkers-out-colm-meaney-and-the-art-of-the-political/

“In ‘69 we decided to form a students’ union in O’Connell’s [secondary school]. [...] [Reactionaries] held a counterdemonstration outside the school gates and they got hold of a lot of little red books by chairman Mao and they burned them outside the school. It was on the front of the Evening Herald. We thought it was hilarious.”

He eventually went to London where he ended up joining John McGrath’s agitprop theatre group [...] They did plays about unemployment and automation. [...] Meaney was in plays about Northern Ireland and world capitalism.

“There were suddenly grants available for working-class guys to go to college and to drama school – and then Thatcherism.” He sighs.

“I do a lot of work in England now. Most British actors I work with are not members of Equity (the performing arts and entertainment trade union)... It’s fucking mad. And then they complain about working 12 hours without a break. ‘Hey boys, wise up’.”

I suggest that starring in Star Trek, a franchise about proselytising, post-scarcity space socialists, isn’t that big a leap from political theatre. Meaney laughs. “I’m very glad you said that,” he says. “I was not a science-fiction guy, but I started to appreciate the genre… Because it’s set in the future you can address any subject you want.” He recalls episodes about genetic engineering and homelessness. “I started to appreciate it more and more.”

“It’s so hard to get shit made unless it’s a fucking Marvel comic,” he says, with a chuckle. “When did we all become 12-year-old kids that all we want to watch is comics?"

He reads the Irish papers online every day and is appalled by the housing crisis. “The house I grew up in was built by the Dublin Corporation,” Meaney says. “How could we build houses then and can’t build them now?... It’s fucking Thatcherism, Reaganism, the neoliberals and the trickle-down economy that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael both bought into, [the idea] that the market will sort everything out. Bollocks.”