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It’s a summer evening in Derry in 1997, the night before four teenage girls and a wee English fella get their GCSE results. In between newsflashes and 90s dance hits, 16-year old Clare nervously explains just what is at stake and why these results are so vitally important: “We’re girls, we’re poor, we’re from Northern Ireland and we’re Catholic!”
Lisa McGee’s riotous Derry Girls, back for its final season, distilled the power of this hilarious drama in just 10 seconds of dialogue. The fears of the four girls – mouthy Michelle, stressed-out Erin, eccentric Orla and anxiety-ridden Clare – were played for humour, but the challenges facing them were real and serious.
Narratives about Northern Ireland, and especially the conflict euphemistically known as “the Troubles”, focus overwhelmingly on men. Derry Girls showed us what life was like for one of society’s most marginalised groups in a time and place some academics have described as an “an armed patriarchy”.
We don’t often hear about daily life for girls and women during this period. The writer Eli Davies makes it clear how such stories are “often flattened out by mainstream conflict narratives”. These tend to centre narratives about paramilitaries, politicians and the British military – all predominantly men.
Derry Girls gloriously upended these conventions by putting Northern Irish girls firmly centre stage.
Real life in Northern Ireland
Horny Michelle gets some of the best lines in the show: “We’re doing it for peace. A piece of that fine, Protestant ass.” Her irreverence is refreshing in a culture that still finds the sexuality of teenage girls subversive.
But audiences might not find it so amusing to learn that if Michelle had got pregnant, she wouldn’t have been able to access vital reproductive care in 1997. She would still struggle now, in 2022.
Read more - https://theconversation.com/derry-girls-the-riotous-show-that-shifted-the-experiences-of-teenage-girls-to-centre-stage-183779