The move from school to real life must have been particularly difficult. Dornan’s mother, Lorna, died of cancer when he was 16. That’s the stage at which young people are pressed into deciding who they will become.
“That’s right. And then four of my best friends were killed in a car accident,” he says. “You may remember this. It was on Friday, 13th August, 1999, on the way up to Portnoo. They were all at Methody. It was a brutal couple of years. I still don’t have a grip on how it will affect me. An uncle at the funeral said the impact won’t hit you for years. I think about that all the time. The further you get from that the more horrific it seems. It was a horrible time.”