STORY OF OCCI BYRNE began life on stage as Swansong. Conor McDermottroe wrote his first stage play in 2002, setting it in his hometown of Sligo. At the centre was the misanthropic character of Austin ‘Occi’ Byrne a misfit that was drawn from McDermottroe’s own memory and experiences. “There were quite a few kids back then in Sligo who didn’t have a father figure and they were ostracised or treated differently and unfairly,” he says. “So this Sligo character was always in the back of my head and I wondered how I could write him. That was the beginning of the character of Austin ‘Occi’ Byrne, the young man who sits on his own on the Sligo quays, feeding and chatting to the swans and looking out over the bay.” The

one man show premiered in Sligo in 2003 and later toured to Galway, Dublin, Edinburgh, London, New York and Philadelphia. It was a tour de force by writer/director/actor McDermottroe who nightly recreated the embattled world of Byrne, a fatherless child striving to make sense of his life among the squinting windows of small town Ireland. It was dark, comic and caustic but on that first opening night in his home town of Sligo McDermottroe was nervous. “I remember thinking at the time, ‘if this goes wrong it will go horribly wrong’. But it didn’t. I then took it to the Galway Arts Festival in 2004. That’s when Swan Song the movie began.”