As already mentioned, Derry Girls writer Lisa McGee is not afraid to make jokes at the expense of female characters like the teenage protagonists. Although there is a lot of talk about how supposedly more mature girls are than boys – which, even if this is true, is still not mature compared to older people – Derry Girls portrays teenage girls like Erin, Claire, Michelle and Orla as being impulsive, melodramatic, childish, delusional, and troublemaking.

Erin, for example, is a social justice warrior before the word had ever been coined. Although she portrays herself as worldly wise and progressive in her thinking, she quickly reverts to the opposite behaviour if she is placed in a situation where she must walk the walk as well as talk the talk. In one episode, Erin is working on the school newspaper and finds a story written by one of the pupils confessing anonymously to being a lesbian. This is later revealed to be Erin’s best friend Claire (because, it seems, all shows nowadays are required to have a least one gay character). Despite Erin campaigning for ‘gay rights’ at the school, as soon as Claire ‘comes out’ to Erin by revealing that she wrote the essay, Erin tells her “don’t come out, go back in!” and assumes Claire is attracted to her saying “I’m not interested in you, not like that!”

Another episode features the characters encountering some gypsies but Erin insists that the gypsies should be called “travellers” and that it is “insulting” and “racist” to call them gypsies. When one of the gypsy/traveller men approaches the characters however, Erin and the others instantly feel threatened and start to run away.

Erin’s best friend Claire is the most sensible of the girls but is also prone to been easily stressed and hysterical. Like many teenagers, when Claire is teased for being too boring and level-headed, or, as the girls put it, a “crack-killer”, she will act out in response. While I noted above that gay characters on films and TV shows have become so ubiquitous that it sometimes feels like there is a diversity quota at work, Claire is a character who just happens to be a lesbian rather than a ‘lesbian character’. In other words, her sexuality is only a small aspect of her overall personality and is largely unimportant.

Erin and Claire’s other friend Michelle is the most impulsive and rebellious of the four and is the one most likely to get the other characters into trouble. As well as her preoccupation with sex, Michelle is also frequently belligerent towards her cousin James who she resents partly for his Englishness and her being forced to live with him.

Erin’s cousin Orla is the simplest and oddest of the girls and is usually unaware of or indifferent to what is going on around her, much to Erin’s annoyance.

The show is also, to use a modern phrase, very ‘heteronormative’ compared to other contemporary female-driven shows. Unlike Claire, who’s gay, and Orla, who is child-like and thus asexual, both Erin and Michelle are shown to be attracted to men and boys their own age and try to get their attention. In the first episode of Series 2, the All-Girls school goes on a trip to collaborate with an All-Boys Protestant school at a ‘friends across the barricades’ event which leads to Erin and Michelle attempting to pull some of the boys. Here there is another subversion of a common trope – instead of teenage boys embarrassing themselves to impress/get off with the opposite sex who are portrayed as more sensible and level-headed, it is the girls who make fools of themselves and cause the boys to be unimpressed.

Here’s one exchange:

Sister Michael: OK, listen up people, according to this you’re going to need a, well, they use the term ‘buddy’, for tomorrow’s activities

Michelle: I bagsy Harry

Erin: What, but that’s not fair, he’s the only good looking one!

Dee: The rest of us are right here.

Michelle: You snooze, you lose Erin.

Erin: (To Dee) I suppose I’ll have you, then.

Dee: Aren’t you a charmer.

Later, Erin awkwardly tries to ‘come on’ to Dee and he tells her he thought she was having “some sort of breakdown” when she advances towards him. It could be argued that this is unrealistic given that teenage boys/men have a higher sex drive than teenage girls/women and so are more desperate to ‘score’ (as characters like Beavis and Butthead would put it) with the opposite sex – a teenage girl like Erin making advances towards a 16 year old me would be like all my Christmases come at once –however I think this makes more sense within the context of the situation. Erin had effectively insulted Dee previously as shown in the above exchange and Northern Ireland in the 1990s would have been a more religious place than it is now so the boys may well have been told that sexually assertive girls like Michelle (and to a lesser extent) Erin were bad news. Also, Harry – whom Erin and Michelle both fancy – wears a purity bracelet indicating a pledge to have no sex before marriage and he turns down Michelle’s offer to “go somewhere more private” in the same scene.

Despite the girls’ flaws, they are still likable characters and are shown to be caring and supportive towards each other, especially in the show’s more dramatic moments.

While Erin’s and Orla’s mothers, Mary and Sarah (who shares her daughter Orla’s general cluelessness) are shown to be caring and attentive parents, Lisa McGee is also not afraid to portray certain mother characters in an unflattering light. In one episode, Mary and Sarah’s aunt Bridie – their mother’s sister who, according to their father Joe, “couldn’t stick her” – makes an appearance at a family wedding and is depicted as being a sour and possessive mother to her son Eammon (portrayed by Father Dougal himself Ardal O’Hanlon).

I like this exchange when we are first introduced to Bridie and Eammon. Mary asks her cousin if he’s seeing anyone and if there is another wedding on the cards:

Eammon: I’m not seeing anyone.

Mary: Plenty of time, I suppose.

Bridie: Eammon’ll never marry.

Gerry: Is that a feeling, Bridie, or an instruction?

Mary and Bridie have a confrontation later on and Mary tells her: “Drop dead, you spiteful old hag!” which Bridie subsequently does!

James’ mother (and Michelle’s aunt) Cathy makes her only appearance in the show during the last episode of Series 2 and is another mother who is not portrayed favourably. Before James was born, Cathy had left Northern Ireland to have an abortion in England but instead chose to have James (“lucky for you eh James!” as Michelle says in the first episode!) and stay in London. It is hinted that Cathy left James with her sister (and Michelle’s mother) in Northern Ireland shortly after getting divorced from James’ stepfather suggesting that she was not prepared to look after James by herself. This is disapproved of by Mary who believes Cathy “abandoned her wain.”

Cathy has only one prominent scene in the episode she appears in but it’s testament to how good both the writing and acting is in this scene that we get a sufficient understanding of her character from it.

Cathy speaks in a Northern-Irish/English hybrid accent (which may well be an affectation) and has little affection for the city she left for London. A commenter on the YouTube video of this scene makes a good point that, while Cathy is affectionate towards her son, she barely looks at him whereas James always looks at her. This suggests that her affection for him, like a lot of things about her, is very shallow.

In the previous episode James mentions that he used to watch Doctor Who with his stepfather when he was little suggesting that Cathy’s husband made an effort to be involved in James’ life despite James not being his biological son. Many single mothers like Cathy would be grateful to marry a man who was willing to take on raising a child that wasn’t their own but Cathy explains:

Cathy: Paul, my ex, well, he just became so controlling.

Mary: Jesus, really?

Cathy: He was unbearable towards the end. It was always, ‘Oh Cathy, why did you stay out all night?’ or ‘Who was that man you were having dinner with, Cathy?’. He was very insecure.

Mary: Wonder why.

Cathy: I mean James’ father was the same. I just seem to attract the possessive, jealous types. I don’t know what it is.

This is the only occasion when James’ father is mentioned and since very little information is revealed about him, we could speculate on his involvement with Cathy. Is James’ real father even aware James exists? Is Cathy sure that the man she calls James’ father really is his father?

Although there is constant talk about ‘feckless fathers’ there is rarely discussion about men who form a relationship with a single mother and become close to her children, only for the mother to leave the man and sever the relationship he has with her children. Could such women be called ‘feckless mothers’?

You can watch the scene in question here (the relevant bit starts around 1:26)

Although Cathy is not an entirely bad character (she did, after all, decide to keep James rather than have an abortion) she is certainly self-centred and superficial. Perhaps because Lisa McGee isn’t focussed on feminism in the show, we get a depiction of a single mother that many feminists and modern viewers would be uncomfortable with in a different context.

After the girls and their mothers, the most notable female character in Derry Girls is the headteacher of their school, Sister Michael. Sister Michael is a nun who acts as a kind of authority figure towards the girls but is also a bit of a rebellious figure in her own right. For example, it is hinted in one episode that Sister Michael doesn’t really believe in God and she is shown in another episode to be subtly supportive of the girls’ efforts to get Claire’s anonymous essay confessing to being a lesbian published in the school paper despite publicly opposing it. This indicates the show’s more progressive or ‘woke’ leanings, but, as with the Troubles, religion in Derry Girls is more in the background albeit a prominent feature of the characters’ lives.