Amanda Coogan: 'When I was growing up, we didn’t sign in public because it outed our family as different, or disabled'

Being born to deaf parents and having sign language as a first language, signing during daily Covid briefings in the north, and her ambitious new production of the Tain - Clodagh Finn meets Amanda Coogan

Amanda Coogan 

It is a singular honour to watch Amanda Coogan (doctor of Performance Art), Una Kealy and Kate McCarthy (doctors of theatre studies) resuscitate Queen Maeve in an act of retrieval so powerful that it retells the famous saga, the Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley), from the warrior queen’s point of view.

Amanda is slipping into the role in the atmospheric gloom of the Choristers’ Hall, a 13th-century medieval chamber at Waterford Treasures museum. She is wearing a head lamp which looks – and perhaps acts – like a third eye.