Colm Ó Clúbhán
(1954-1989)After emigrating from Dublin to South London in 1973, Ó Clúbhán established himself as a promising actor, poet and playwright, penning half-a-dozen plays about being queer and Irish before his death at the age of 34. None of them have ever been published.
Colm Ó Clúbhán was born in Dublin in 1954. His father was the poet and playwright Sigerson Clifford, who told him to “never darken my door again” when Colm revealed to him he was gay. He emigrated to London in 1973, where he became a part of the Railton Road squats in Brixton. They offered a place of sanctuary for Ó Clúbhán and provided space for his creative expression.
As he would later write in 1986 in Out for Ourselves: The Lives of Irish Lesbians & Gay Men, “London, that beacon of lust and potential occasions of sin was, I decided, where I was going to come out; get myself together, find other queers…”
He was a founding member of the Brixton Faeries, an agitprop gay theatre troupe emerged from Railton Road, which also included fellow Irish residents such as Terry Stewart of Belfast and Jim Ennis of Mayo. Together they navigated politics, relationships and the challenges of being Irish emigrants in London during the 1970s and 1980s. He performed and co-devised works including Mr Punch’s Nuclear Family and Gents.
After several years teaching English in Barcelona, Ó Clúbhán returned to London in the mid-1980s and continued his writing, winning the Hennessy Award in 1986 for his short story ‘The Flood’. Writing a profile of Ó Clúbhán for Out following his award, Eamon Somers described him as a writer particularly interested in “the problems and contradictions of being Irish and gay and living in London”.
Graham Norton (then Graham Walker) in Reasons for Staying at the Oval House, 1986.
His first solo play, Friends of Rio Rita’s, took its title from the LGBT slang term ‘Friend of Dorothy’ and the drag queen Rio Rita in Brendan Behan's play The Hostage who Ó Clúbhán described as “probably the only gay character I know of in Irish drama”. The play is set in a London flat shared by two Irish gay men, Finbarr and Mick. Jim MacSweeney, Ó Clúbhán’s friend and fellow member of the Irish Gay Theatre Group, played the role of Mick in the first performances of the play at the Oval House in 1985.
While many of Ó Clúbhán's characters reflected his own identity as an Irish emigrant and the political currents of republicanism and gay liberation, he also illuminated further marginalised worlds of the Irish abroad.
One character in his second play Reasons for Staying, performed in 1986, is an Irish woman who first travelled to England seeking an abortion. According to Ed Madden, "Clifford’s work offers a window into 1970s and 1980s queer migrant communities that have largely escaped cultural and critical attention and a critical intervention into representations of the London Irish.” It premiered at the Oval House, directed by Stephen Gee with a cast including the young Graham Norton.
In the play, Cormac also tells the tale of a gay-bashing, one of the only representations in Irish literature of the 1982 Fairview Park murder, a gay-bashing that galvanised Ireland’s queer community into public protest.
His other plays for theatre and radio, all currently unpublished, include Dermot Begley’s Last Chance (1985), Beyond Kansas (1986), Fair Game (1988), A Rip in the World (1988), and Flesh and Blood in a Well-Fed State (1988).
In March 1989, Ó Clúbhán died of an AIDS-related illness at the London Lighthouse. He was 34-years-old.
A tribute to Ó Clúbhán can be found in the opening scenes of the 1991 film Strip Jack Naked, directed by Ron Peck. In the film, Peck memorialised Ó Clúbhán, who had worked with him on Nighthawks, as both a creative collaborator and an outspoken activist. Peck’s voiceover describes how Ó Clúbhán was “a fighter… He was out on the streets and insisting on his right to be gay. He wasn’t going to be discreet about it.”
An obituary by his friend Stephen Gee, who had directed the premiere of Reasons for Staying in 1986, appeared in the LGBTQ+ press. Gee described Ó Clúbhán’s funeral at the London Lighthouse, a well-known HIV/AIDS centre and hospice, as a “defiant and rude celebration of his life”. “His ashes will be scattered in the Irish Sea, somewhere between Ireland and England,” he wrote, “which is where he feels he belongs.” There is a bench in Brockwell Park, Brixton, dedicated to his memory.
His entire catalogue is held by his appointed next of kin, Mary Evans Young and Derek Evans, with a small collection in the Hall–Carpenter Archives. In recent years, his work is being re-examined by academics. Professor Ed Madden of the University of South Carolina has carried out detailed research on Ó Clúbhán's works and hosted a Boston College Ireland symposium on Ó Clúbhán in 2017.
Plays
Dermot Begley’s Last Chance, 1985
Friends of Rio Rita’s, 1985
Reasons for Staying, 1986
Beyond Kansas, 1986
Fair Game, 1988
Flesh and Blood in a Well-Fed State, 1988
A Rip in The World, 1988
The Risk, undated
The Body Beneath, undated
Southern Comfort, undated
Resources
A biographical note by Mary Evans Young and Derek Evans, March 2025.
An overview of the work of Brixton Faeries by Unfinished Histories.
A guide to the South London Gay Community Centre by Ian Townson.
Photo: Mary Evans Young and Derek Evans