Cathal is turning real life into great fiction

A KILKISHEN creative writer has used locations in Shannon and Limerick City for a new award-winning film script about mental illness that is interwoven with a mysterious stalker.
Cathal O’Hagan (22) is delighted with the success of his film script “It Lives In the Alleyways”, which can be made into a one-hour movie.
“I am surprised with all the awards the film script has won. It is based on the lives of two people who I know and I thought it would make a great film,” he said.
“I also added in other people. While the film deals with mental illness, there is also a great twist because the viewer doesn’t know if the stalker is real or not.
“It also deals with the impact of drugs and being stalked. Women can regularly be victims of stalkers. Shannon and Limerick have a lot of laneways in housing estates, which I felt would be ideal for the stalker to use.”
Having sent his script to a few film producers, he is very hopeful it will make it to movie screens. He has already started work on the sequel. In 2023, he started writing the first film script and submitted it to various film festivals where he picked up numerous accolades.
Last week, he won a screenwriting certificate at the International New York Film Festival.
He was a semi-finalist at the London International Screenwriting Competition, the Edinburgh Film Awards, the Melbourne Independent Film Festival, Berlin Shorts Award and Berlin International Screenwriting Festival.
Last July, he was awarded a certificate of excellence for best short script at the Dublin Movie Awards. It was originally a short script and he extended it into a full film.
On December 1, he will be attending the European Film Gala, which is being held in Glasgow, while he will be awarded another certificate.
This fiction story, which is designed to show people what it is like to live with mental illness, is based in an industrial city in the 2010s.
It outlines the life of a spoilt 17 year-old city boy called Jake Harris, who survives an overdose in a rough city nightclub with his cool kid circle and is left mentally ill and an isolated outcast to society and his peers.
Harris ignored the sighting of a creepy figure hidden in an old hooded green army jacket watching him, which he thought looked like the strange figure he saw beckoning him into an alleyway that night just before collapsing of an overdose.
A chain of terrifying events force Harris to slowly discover he is in the sick twisted game of this strange figure who lives in and moves around by the city’s dark dirty alleyways.
With his mother and the doctor, the only people he has, not believing him and diagnosing it as visions caused by his mental illness, Harris must fight on his own to survive the stalker’s sick game and reveal his identity to the world.
The main character is loosely based on the lives of several different real-life people who Mr O’Hagan has met across Ireland. The setting, which is in an industrial city is based mostly on Shannon and some locations in Limerick City. The film script is in two parts and one of the main locations was a creepy old concrete World War Two bunker, which was based on the one which is in the field beside Shannon Airport.
The main location in the city laneways is based on the housing estate laneways in Shannon and Limerick. The main character’s apartment was also based on yellow apartment blocks In Shannon.
The city river going into a powerstation that features throughout the film is based on the river in Limerick connecting with Ardnacrusha Hydroelectric Generating Station.
Born in Ennis, he now lives in Kilkishen where his mother, Martina was born and raised. Starting off in Clarecastle National School, he finished his primary education in Kilkishen National School after moving to Kilkishen in 2013.
After completing his Leaving Certificate at St Joseph’s Secondary School, Tulla, he completed courses in creative writing and screen writing at the College of Further Education in Limerick and Lir Academy, Dublin in 2023.
A keen local history enthusiast, he wrote a booklet entitled “Kilkishen in the Famine” to commemorate the 180th anniversary of the Great Famine.
In 2022, he wrote a children’s book Lights of the Lissahawn based on the folklore and history of the Clonlea parish in the form of Irish mythology. One of the women in this book is based on Máire Rua. It contains a mixture of characters from history and folklore, the O’Flynn’s rulers of Clonlea from Celtic to medieval times, the McInerneys, rulers of Bunratty until Cromwellian Times, the McNamaras, rulers of East Clare until Cromwellian times, St Patrick, Ireland’s patron saint, St Senan of Iniscarthy, druids, fairies, and the Banshee.
For the previous three years, he ran a website and Facebook page featuring local history articles.