S1:EP1 (2020) with Bernadette McAliskey
S1:EP2 (2020) with Margaretta D’Arcy
S1:EP4 (2020) with Nell McCafferty
Photo: Cathy Dunne
Lelia Doolan is a film and theatre director, producer, actor, journalist and activist. Lelia’s former RTÉ colleague Bob Quinn says that Lelia ‘does not enter company; she descends on it’. Lelia began working at RTÉ in the 1960s. By age 27, she was directing The Riordans, and soon after founded 7 Days, the precursor to PrimeTime. She co-authored a book Sit Down and Be Counted following her resignation from RTE over their commercial policies.
In 1971 she became the first female artistic director of the Abbey Theatre since Lady Gregory. She has a PhD in Anthropology and also has qualifications in the Irish language, in science, and in Homeopathy. She established Ireland’s first course in Media Communications at Rathmines College (now DIT). Michael D Higgins appointed her chairperson of the Irish Film Board when it re-constituted in 1993.
She co-founded the Galway Film Fleadh and the Cinemobile. She infamously barged into a Hollywood board room armed with bacon, sausages and a bottle of whiskey and put them on the table demanding funds for her first feature film Reefer and the Model…and they gave it to her. She worked in Botswana and Zimbabwe creating a media and arts campaign to help improve the livelihoods of disabled women, and worked with Sr Stan on projects for women experiencing homelessness.
She was part of the Burren Acton Group against the building of an interpretive centre in Mullaghmore ending up in the High Court successfully preventing the build and resulting in fundamental change to Irish planning legislation. She has joined in the protests against the use of Shannon airport by the US military, the Corrib Gas Pipe Line and lent her support to the equal marriage campaign and Repeal the 8th.
Most recently, she was involved in the re-opening of Yeats’s Tower Thoor Ballylee and spearheaded the building of Galway’s art-house cinema the Picture Palace.
2011 saw the premiere of her critically-acclaimed and award-winning documentary about Bernadette McAliskey called Bernadette: Notes on a Political Journey.
