Irish Women in Film I
Recorded at the 2025 Capital Irish Film Festival in Washington DC, this episode features a conversation with two Irish women who have both made significant transitions into film from other careers.
Kathleen Harris, a former Irish Times video journalist, discusses her environmental documentary Birdsong, which won the 2025 CIFF Audience Award for Favorite Irish Feature. Denise Deegan, a novelist, talks about her award-winning short, The Innkeeper.
Birdsong follows ornithologist Seán Ronayne as he attempts to record every bird species in Ireland, traveling to some of the country's most remote locations along the way.
The Innkeeper is a short comedy drama set around a school nativity play, which carries a quiet but powerful message about homelessness in Ireland.
Both guests left stable careers — Harris from journalism, Deegan from running a PR business — to pursue film making, and both talk candidly about the leap involved. A thread running through the conversation is how each approached social issues in their work: Harris structured Birdsong to balance wonder with concern about Ireland's biodiversity crisis, while Deegan deliberately withheld The Innkeeper's central point until the final moment. Neither wanted to lecture. Both wanted to leave the audience feeling something had shifted.
Links
Kathleen Harris
Denise Deegan
The Films
Irish Stew Links
- Website
- Media Partner: IrishCentral
Episode Details: Season 8, Episode 6; Total Episode Count: 147
00:00 - Introduction
03:00 - Kathleen Harris Background
05:27 - Denise Deegan Background
07:26 - KH: Leaving Journalism to Make Birdsong
12:40 - DD: Portia Mc Laughlin Star of The Innkeeper
14:17 - DD: From Acclaimed Novels to Screenwriting
17:05 - KH: Documentary Challenges - Shooting Birdsong
21:33 - KH: Birdsong and Biodiversity
24:45 - DD: The Innkeeper and Contemporary Social Issues
28:58 - DD: Future Projects
32:05 - KH: Upcoming Projects
33:23 - Martin Recap
34:30 - Credits
Documentary Filmmaker / Video Journalist
Kathleen is a documentary film director and freelance videographer based in Dublin. She also collaborates with other filmmakers and journalists as a researcher, editor, and cinematographer. Her environmental film BIRDSONG is currently screening in Ireland: www.birdsongfilm.com.
Previously, Kathleen directed the hour-long documentary Growing Up at the End of the World, which aired on RTÉ in 2020. The film follows three teen climate activists for 18 months as they strike from school, lead protest marches in Ireland, and work alongside Greta Thunberg to create a vision for the youth climate justice movement.
From 2014 to 2022, Kathleen worked as a video journalist for The Irish Times, shooting and editing news videos and short documentaries on a wide range of subjects, including Ireland’s abortion and gay marriage referendums, sexual assault on college campuses, and grassroots environmental activism. She has also covered stories about human migration in Bangladesh, Greece, and France. In 2021, she was named Video Journalist of the Year by the NewsBrands Journalism Awards for a short documentary covering a Covid surge at a Dublin hospital.
Author / Screenwriter
Denise Deegan is a Cork-born novelist and PAGE Award-winning screenwriter who tackles themes of loss and injustice through humor. Before writing full-time, she worked as a nurse, PR executive, and college lecturer. Her novels include the Butterfly trilogy and the award-winning historical novel Through the Barricades. Her move into screenwriting came through a Screen Ireland course. She now writes on RTÉ's Fair City and has multiple TV series and features in development. Her short film The Innkeeper has won awards at festivals worldwide and is screening on Virgin Atlantic flights.
