In the seventh episode of In the Half Light, curator Phil Mullen returns to a conversation with three writers about their experiences of growing up mixed-race in Ireland: Marguerite Penrose (author of Yeah But Where Are You Really From?), Jackie McCarthy O’Brien (author of We Made It, Kid) and Leon Diop (author of Mixed Up: An Irish Boys Journey to Belonging)

In the sixth episode of In the Half Light, curator Phil Mullen speaks to three writers about their experiences of growing up mixed-race in Ireland: Marguerite Penrose (author of Yeah But Where Are You Really From?), Jackie McCarthy O’Brien (author of We Made It, Kid) and Leon Diop (author of Mixed Up: An Irish Boys Journey to Belonging)

In this final episode, our guest speaks openly and candidly about her childhood in an Irish industrial school. In recalling the ordinary routines of the home — the mix of care and radicalisation — we see how this shaped the way she learned to move through the world.

In this conversation, we hear from an Irish woman who grew up as a mixed-race child in a country that insisted on a story of itself as white. These kind of experiences rarely made it into the reports on the state’s institutions. Her story illuminates what it meant to navigate childhood in such an atmosphere.

In Episode 3, this series concludes by reflecting on experiences that carried into later life, and what it was like to grow up Black in Ireland before the Celtic Tiger.