Ainle Ó Cairealláin

Yeah, well, the first time I went to Palestine was in 2018 and it was on the back of just a longstanding curiosity to go to Palestine and find out more about what was happening on the ground there.

And really that stems from growing up in West Belfast and having this sort of awareness that there was a connection between Palestine

ourselves as Irish people going through like an anti-colonial struggle and other countries who are going through something similar.

And I say, I use the term similar kind of cautiously because while there are always parallels between communities that are in struggle, there's always differences between them as well.

Like no two circumstances are exactly the same.

And that really was what kind of encouraged me to go to Palestine in the first place.

to learn more about what was happening.

And with regard to the gym and how that came about, really actually some of the stuff that you mentioned there in the wee introduction about growing up with our parents and being really fully involved in...

community activism and particularly around the Irish language and what that meant for us as children is probably when the seeds were planted for everything that I was to do from that point forward, really.

So I was born in 19...

85 giving away my age and in West Belfast is where we grew up and when you're there was a lot of things happening at the time in terms of the conflict and when you're born into something like that you don't really have an awareness that there's anything else outside of that it just becomes the environment that you're that you're growing up in yeah

And in terms of our own household, my father, Gerard, and my mother, Aoife, were heavily involved in sort of community development.

They were heavily involved in the formation of the school that we would end up going to, Manskill Farshteh, which was founded in 1991.

I went there in 96.

And the school was based in the culture land on the Falls Road, which was a cultural centre.

that housed the newspaper that my father started in 1986, as it happens.

He started it initially by cycling around Ireland with his friend, Eoin O'Neill, from Gaeltacht to Gaeltacht.

And when they got back to Belfast, they had enough money to start the first daily Irish language newspaper in the whole country.

No way.

And it had the theatre company that my dad started that we grew up in as well.