“When Stephen sent me Collectively Counting I instantly knew he was onto something special. As well as the obvious potency and timeliness of the message, there is a warmth and humanity to the poem which travels beyond this strange time we find ourselves in.”

Conor O’Brien (Villagers)

Since first performing for us in Belfast, the seriously talented Dublin poet and playwright Stephen James Smith has become a friend of The Duncairn. He recently introduced us to the arts-based mental health charity First Fortnight, and gave us the opportunity to find out more from its co-founder David Keegan about how arts and culture is helping, supporting, and standing up for people with mental health.

Where do you turn when you are 16 years old and you fit nowhere? When your peer group sees you as an ‘other.’ When the ‘others’ hold your peer group in contempt. David Keegan turned on himself. His self-harming started as a teenager, and ultimately became one of the motivations behind his co-founding of an organisation called First Fortnight. It is a Dublin-based, Ireland-wide charity that challenges mental health prejudice through the creative arts, including a goliath multi-disciplinary mental health arts festival that takes place in counties throughout Ireland during the fragile first two weeks of each new year.

“I had been self-harming from the age of about 16,” he told me matter-of-factly. David, and poet Stephen James Smith were holding a Zoom conversation with me from the First Fortnight Centre for Creative therapies, based in Haven House, a long-term homeless accommodation project in Dublin's North inner city. “I had a schizophrenic uncle and through actually doing the work of First Fortnight I learnt a lot about my family tree, how it was all hidden from me. So, I am very much the product of secrecy and stigma. I have experienced it from a very early age, and it wasn't necessarily specific to mental health either.”

“My background is art and culture, so I suppose I'm probably a frustrated failed artist who never really had the courage or conviction to pursue it as a career. I am kind of in awe of those who have that courage.”
David Keegan

David Keegan grew up in Tallaght, an expansive suburb in the south west of Dublin. As a boy he was sent to ‘posh’ school, away from his friends, and his sense of belonging started to unravel: “I suppose one of the things that motivated me to start this in the first place, besides being directly affected, was stigma, particularly as a lad that grew up in Tallaght… I was heavily stigmatized by my social group in that [to them] I was posh, going to a posh school. And in the posh school I was a Tallaght knacker basically. I couldn't really win either way. So, I was very directly affected by stigma from a very early age. I was very aware of its effects, and I suppose I was also of a generation of men and women I suppose who were told that the only acceptable emotion to express, is anger. Particularly as a man. So, I didn't really know how to express what I was going through when I was going through a difficult period in my life. I found the physical pain far easier to endure than the mental trauma.”

In his teens he met a young man by the name of JP Swaine who through a joint love for culture and arts was to become a long-time friend of Keegan’s, eventually moving into Swaine’s house in his late twenties. This was during a period in which Dublin was suffering a massive upsurge in people taking their own life. “We were in an epidemic of sorts at the time, a suicide epidemic,” Keegan recalled, “and [JP and me] started to talk about it… it was really that premise, it was born out of a desperate need to have that conversation”

“I worked in business development, marketing, communications. My friend JP, he worked in social work and social care and trained in psychotherapy. He was working in the homeless sector when we started putting our brains together.” Coming from the insight of their own backgrounds and personal experiences, they began to examine what they could do to help deal with this situation. “You do what you know, and we came from that space… Personally, when I went through the experience of self-harm, I was lucky that my dad had taught me chords on the guitar - probably four. After that it was like: ‘OK old man, I need you no more.’”

“I suppose from that moment on with those four chords, that became the way that I was able to cope. I just started to write music about what I was going through, and I was not turning to a knife or a blade, I was turning to a guitar and a pen and a bit of paper. So, again, as selfish as it sounds, I started First Fortnight to help people like me, and I knew that I was not alone in my experience.”

“The last thing we want to do is preach to the converted, that is fucking waste of our time,” he explained as we talked about how the programme works. “We want to program high quality art because that will have the opportunity to inspire something in somebody else, or inspire conversation, or basically do what it is programmed to do … this festival is for everybody, we all have mental health and we provide a window to all of the mental health topics that we could possibly program in to be discussed. For those who are not involved in arts and culture, I suppose if they are a newbie who came in off the street we try to then contextualise with post-show discussion for those who may not be too familiar with theatre.”

Gavin James performing at Therapy Session Workmans Club.

First Fortnight, Ireland’s annual Mental Health Art & Culture Festival, takes places during the first fortnight of every new year. David explains: “My co-founder, [JP Swaine], was acutely aware of his case load jumping up in that first quarter of every new year. Christmas, New Year, can be a very challenging and a very lonely place for a lot of people. It’s very isolating and for a lot of people who have had a challenging previous year, and are looking at a new one, that can be quite daunting. So that was our critical time.”

“We start off the new year, that first fortnight of the new year, programming a multidisciplinary festival… We founded what we do on the principle that art and culture is transformative and immensely powerful. It enables conversation. Ultimately artists reflect the society in which we live so who better then to go to artists to reflect what we are experiencing, in order to ignite some meaningful conversation around some of the subject matter.”

One very specific, and yet very wide-reaching area of subject matter that has impacted on every single one of us is the ongoing Covid crisis. In response to the pressures and unimagined realities that Covid 19 has brought, First Fortnight has collaborated with poet Stephen James Smith, to present Collectively Counting, a poem accompanied by breath-taking film directed by videographer Craig Kenny.

“From First Fortnight’s perspective we had been watching the landscape… myself and my co-founder, it was actually his idea, we talked about what would be an appropriate response from us. And actually, this is it. This is exactly the type of thing that we should be doing, supporting, making a call for solidarity and togetherness, and supporting each other through it.

They laughed when I asked why First Fortnight had reached out to Stephen to write this poem. “He just happened to be in the office at the time,” David had stated. “That's the truth of it,” Stephen had laughed. “I turned around and I says: ‘here will you write me a poem?' David added.

“It was the Young director Craig who approached me,” Stephen explained when things settled again. Coronavirus had resulted in multiple cancellations for the poet, so he had the time on his hands. “The ask was so sincere. When I looked at his work, he works to a very high standard, so I thought why not try and write something? It worked, and I got the two musicians involved.”

Those two musicians turned out to be the enormous talents of Conor O'Brien who featured on trumpet, and Gareth Quinn Redmond on piano. The result is a sweeping, calming balm of a video. The questions in the poet’s words – the familiars and the unfamiliars and the reassuringly similar questions that I have in my head. The relaxed hug a voice. The passing clouds in the piano, the down to earth trumpet grounding it all. Listen well and you hear a bird fly by. You hear a bird fly by. A Covid new normal. It’s a singularly beautiful piece of art.

“Collectively Counting is a call for us all to pause for a moment and count together the many questions and wanderings that this time has brought to us.”

“The National Office of Suicide Prevention touched base with First Fortnight about possibly doing something,” Stephen continued. “We had just finished our video and it kind of just married up. So it wasn't written specifically with the intention but when I saw the brief and what not, it was a good marriage.”

Stephen James Smith has been involved with First Fortnight for several years. “Eight years ago I volunteered as performer and I just liked what the guys were doing. As a result of that I stayed connected and the following year I ended up MCing the event and I tried to get more poetry involved - the event was pretty much music and I was the only poet… I came in, I performed, I liked what I saw. A bit like The Duncairn to be fair, I kind of came up there and saw the great work that you guys are doing with the community and the community spirit that you have at the centre which I really bought into.”