Zoë’s first bed was a drawer. It is still lying there, beside her parent’s bed, untouched and rotting. It’s been lying there, discarded, for her entire life. She is 34.
Zoë takes her two sisters and her parents back to the cottage near Kiltyclogher, Co. Leitrim, where they all lived in the late 1970s. Her parents still own the cottage, but have never bothered to go back to collect their belongings in half a lifetime.
Zoë grew up knowing all about life in the cottage but has not been there since she was a baby. She has never even seen a photograph of it and can only imagine what life must have been like in a stone cottage with no electricity and no water. After they left, her parents spent many years moving around, mainly for work, but have lived only 35 miles away from the cottage for the past six years.
As Zoë and her family travel back to the cottage they each consider what the cottage meant to them and why they’ve never bothered to return. They sift through the stuff that they once owned in the deserted cottage they reflect on what it was like to live there and what happened to all those years since they closed the door and walked away.
Produced and narrated by Zoë Comyns
Production Supervision by Sarah Blake
Sound Supervision by Mark McGrath
About the Documentary Maker: Zoë Comyns
Zoë Comyns is an awarding winning Independent Radio Producer.
Zoë has written and produced two radio dramas – Flights of Fancy starring Alan Stanford and Frank Kelly broadcast in 2012 which won the New York Festivals Best Writing Award 2012 and Another Blooming Day starring Ruth McCabe which won the PPI Award for Best Drama in 2009.
She has produced a number of documentaries for radio; on Irish pub culture, Have you no Homes to Go to?, on Irish grandmothers, Yer at Yer Granny’s on the relationship with Irish people and their grandmothers as well as 13 part series, Crossing Boundaries: The Experience of Migrant Woman in Ireland.
She was the producer of the weekly Arts and Culture show Culture Shock for Newstalk 106-108fm for 3 years which won a silver PPI Award in 2010.
Prior to radio, she worked in television; she has considerable experience in the research and production of programming and has worked on a documentary for SBS Australia that explored the intergenerational experience of cancer and its therapeutic treatment through Opera Therapy which won a Silver Hugo award in Documentary: Arts/Humanities (Chicago International Film Festival) 2006.
Zoë Comyns was Assistant Producer on a feature length documentary ‘Where Was Your Family During the Famine’? for RTE1 tracing the family roots of 3 well known individuals back to the period of the Famine. She has researched almost 20 short form documentaries including those for broadcast on RTE 1 for the series Three 60 and Capital D.
Zoë is also a part -time lecturer in DCU where she guides workshops on Writing for Radio in the Communications Department.