Arts Week with Judy Murphy

Wexford man Eoin Ryan is “bringing the trawler westward” this weekend when his one-man show, Trawled, which he wrote and co-directs, plays the city’s Town Hall Theatre studio space on Friday night and the Station House Theatre in Clifden on Saturday.

It’s an autobiographical play about surviving suicide, in which Eoin, now aged 50, revisits his younger self when he was living in Australia.

While there, the then 24-year-old decided to embark on an adventure, fishing on a prawn trawler on the Coral Sea. He dramatically recreates his audacious bid to join the crew and the swift, harsh lessons he learned about the reality of life on a fishing trawler.

Although he had no fishing experience, Eoin grew up on a farm, and says he could have coped with the backbreaking work, but other factors intervened. Unforeseen circumstances, fragile relationships and shifting motivations created an unbearable ‘perfect storm’ for the play’s central character. In bringing this “raw distillation of life” to the stage,

Eoin is keeping a promise he made on the ship, “at my darkest moment”.

He pledged that “if I can get out of this hole, I’ll help others”.

Clearly, he did survive and before returning to Ireland, he spent time in Argentina, working in a home for abandoned and disabled children, set up by an Irishman, Fr Liam Ryan.

“It was the best thing I’d ever done in my life,” Eoin says, explaining that it made him realise how lucky he was.

“It wasn’t intended, but it gave me perspective,” he recalls, adding that in his experience, the act of helping others helps everyone involved.

“If you help others, you help yourself. I realised what happened on that trawler didn’t define me.”

Instead of going to the police about that incident, Eoin “took responsibility” for his role in events, which  proved cathartic.

Having kept a diary, in 2019 he wrote a book about that episode and “how close I came to dying by suicide on the boat”.

Pictured: Eoin Ryan in Trawled, which will play Galway City and Clifden this weekend.