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administrative in the music world would pay a wage, while feeding my need for music.’ He got a job at the Wigmore Hall in London, organising and promoting concerts ‘which was a great opportunity’ but after a few years, he realised that ‘I was envious of watching the musicians perform. I loved the concerts but there was always a little bit of sadness that I wasn’t up there.’ At a party he met a theatre director, who urged him to apply for a job at the West Yorkshire Playhouse: ‘She thought with my experience in music administration and my family background in theatre, I would be a good fit.’ She was right: he got the job and the rest is history. His career as a theatre producer has taken him around the world, from London to Los Angeles to Sydney to Mumbai, not forgetting The Emergency Room and Corn Exchange in Dublin. He has produced some of the most iconic performances of recent decades including Fiona Shaw in Happy Days , Richard Griffiths in The History Boys , Vanessa Redgrave in The Year of Magical Thinking , Helen Mirren and Ruth Negga in Phèdre , Jeremy Irons and Lesley Manville in Long Day’s Journey into Night . The way he describes the job of producer, it runs the gamut: ‘Depending on the play, I’m looking at spreadsheets and budgets and fundraising. I’m focusing on marketing materials, images and copyright. I’m organising tours. I’m putting together a creative team and giving feedback on scripts, and I’m applying plasters where they are needed.’ He gives an example from the play he is currently working on, Jennifer Lunn’s Es & Flo : ‘There’s a kettle on stage and at the technical rehearsal, we realised that it was boiling too loudly, so I had to shoot down to Argos to get a quiet boiling kettle. Anyone who thinks the job of a producer is glamorous, it really isn’t!’ Jennifer Lunn calls him ‘an incredible producer – humble yet tenacious – going out to bat for the work every day’. This year he received the Writers Guild of Great Britain Olwen Wymark Award for the Encouragement of New Playwriting, after Lunn nominated him for his tireless championing of Es & Flo through the COVID pandemic and other difficulties. He sees the core of his work as supporting actors. It helps that Pádraig has been around them all his life – as well as his parents, sisters, brothers-in-law and nephews, his eldest daughter, Megan, is now an actress (she plays Nancy Corrigan in Call the Midwife ). ‘I am in awe of actors, the way they get up, night after night, and bare their souls to a thousand people that they’ve never met before. I want their minds to be focused on the thing on stage, not worrying about something else, so I take the view that nothing is too much trouble. Leave it with me.’ He is currently Executive Producer of the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff and Consultant Producer to the National Centre for Performing Arts in Mumbai, plus he takes on freelance commissions, and many of the productions tour. It sounds like a huge amount of travel and astonishingly he lives in Skibbereen, West Cork, where his wife runs their small farm of ‘11 acres and 30 sheep’. How does he deal with it? ‘I’m a good traveller. I don’t get jet lag. I try to be home every weekend. When we first moved here, in the late 1990s, we had no phones or access to email, so I was quite un-contactable. That was when I learnt to delegate, which has been very useful.’ By strange symmetry, this other major decision in his life, where to live, was also occasioned by a mugging: ‘I’d just been appointed as producer for the National Theatre in London and had just bought a house there when my wife was mugged on the doorstep in broad daylight. It freaked us out. By chance, my sister Sinéad, who has a house in West Cork, mentioned there was a house near hers for sale. We decided quite spontaneously to sell up in London and move and luckily it has worked out brilliantly.’ At weekends in Skibbereen, he immerses himself back in his first love, classical music: ‘My left hand is too weak for the cello but I can manage pretty well on the piano though ideally without a discerning audience! Playing calms me down and is my reward for hard work.’ And then on Monday morning, it’s back to Cardiff, Mumbai, London - where Es & Flo transferred in June to the Kiln Theatre - or another city entirely. ‘I’m used to it, and so is my family, but I’m not sure the dog has ever forgiven me – she got used to having me round in COVID and giving her the attention she feels she deserves and now when I come and go, I can see her thinking “what about me?”’
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Deployed to aid the frontline in Ukraine Ana-Maria Murphy-Teixidor shares with Trinity Today how her Masters in Development Practice (MDP) prepared her for deployment to Ukraine, working for the UN International Organisation for Migration In early May, Ana-Maria Murphy-Teixidor was watching the news and saw drones being shot down over Maidan Square in Kyiv – ‘it was exactly where my office and apartment are. I was in Boston, back home on a visit, and I did panic a bit, thinking of my friends and colleagues. That’s when I understood what my parents and friends are going through with me being there. But otherwise, I just take it as normal.’ In April 2022, two months after Russia invaded Ukraine – or, as she puts it more precisely ‘after the escalation of the war which started with the invasion of Crimea in 2014’ – Ana-Maria was deployed by the UN International Organisation for Migration (UN IOM) from Tunisia, where she was stationed as the Libya Operation Research Officer, to Ukraine. ‘I got maybe two days’ notice before flying out. At the start it was chaos. The UN IOM did have operations in Ukraine, but very small and it was a family duty station, so the existing staff were being evacuated as we came in. And of course it wasn’t just the IOM arriving; every major development and aid agency including UNICEF, UNHCR, the World Food Programme, the Red Cross and all the big NGOs were coming in. We had to coordinate our responses and work out how to register people and allocate aid equitably, without duplication. There were seven million people internally displaced within Ukraine alone, not counting those who emigrated abroad, so it was a massive operation.’ Ana-Maria’s Masters in Development Practice (MDP) from Trinity prepared her ‘really well’ for working in emergency and conflict situations ‘but of course when you get thrown in at the deep end, the reality is always different to what you studied, and you just have to figure it out. When you’re studying policy, gender and governance at a high level, you don’t imagine that your day-to-day will revolve around registering people and processing payments, but that was the immediate need when I arrived in Ukraine.’ As reporting officer with the IOM’s Cash-based Initiatives (CBI) team, Anna-Maria reveals that ‘CBI is a programme specifically developed for humanitarian and emergency situations to provide cash for people who have to evacuate quickly and need rent, fuel, food. It’s not always possible to implement CBI - in some situations you might need to give food, heating and shelter directly and create supply chains and set up refugee camps, but Ukraine has good infrastructure and local government so it’s a question of working with local and regional agents to register people in need. From an environmental and community viewpoint, the IOM prefers CBI because it keeps aid local and sustainable and it has certainly worked well in Ukraine. In fact, the massive coordinated response by so many different agencies has improved the national systems – the social protection system, for instance, is now fully integrated and exemplary of its kind.’ The IOM CBI team is based in Kyiv, with occasional missions to the regions. ‘I don’t feel unsafe in Kyiv. Mostly, things feel shockingly normal. In October and November, air-raid alarms sounded constantly and disturbed our sleep, but it was only alarms. Perhaps there is an unconscious fear of a missile hitting which people cope with by going out and having a good time. Bars and restaurants are full until the 12 midnight curfew. Living in Kyiv is not so different to being in another capital European city. It’s when you’re coordinating a response to the front line, that it really hits you.’ Ana-Maria has an Irish father and a Spanish mother and grew up in the US, and briefly in the UK. She thinks this multicultural background was a factor in her deciding to study Biology and International Relations in Tufts University in Massachusetts. She was drawn to the environmental justice and policy part of her course, and decided to do a Master’s in development. Her father is a ‘proud Trinity graduate’ (in STEM) which guided her choice. She loved living in Dublin and connecting with her Irish family, including ‘dinner with my great-uncle once a week’ and she loved Trinity, where she worked in the Global Room as a global ambassador and ‘met people from all over’. ‘It was a two year programme, and we were a small group, I think 20 people. The placements were excellent. I worked with Concern and Oxfam in Dublin, with an NGO in Senegal called Millennium Promise with a focus on water security, and with the OECD in Paris. They were all brilliant experiences and very diverse and the academic programme was also broad and multidisciplinary. That has turned out to be really helpful because in my work I need a very diverse skill-set and a lot of adaptiveness.’
