As Lisa McGee’s How To Get To Heaven From Belfast lands on Netflix, we’re suddenly aware that it’s been nearly four years since Derry Girls left us with that final, heart‑thumping montage: a group of teenage bandits voting “yes” in the Good Friday Agreement referendum, Dreams by The Cranberries swelling in the background, and all of us quietly undone by nostalgia.
McGee’s new series isn’t a sequel in plot, but it’s unmistakably born from the same emotional DNA. Once again, she’s writing about women — not the glossy, idealised version, but the real ones. The ones who love each other fiercely, irritate each other endlessly, and cling to each other anyway. Only this time, the friendships aren’t teenage and hopeful; they’re adult, complicated, and frayed at the edges.
A trio bound by history, undone by adulthood
The series follows three women who were once “inseparable” at school but now orbit very different lives.
- Saoirse (Roisin Gallagher), a BAFTA‑winning TV writer who looks successful on paper but can’t quite convince her oldest friends she’s happy.
- Robyn (Sinéad Keenan), a mother of three whose marriage is quietly suffocating her.
- Dara (Caoilfhionn Dunne), heartbroken, exhausted, and caring for a mother whose health is slipping away.
Their lives are messy in different ways — the kind of mess you can hide from colleagues, neighbours, even partners, but never from the people who knew you when you were fifteen.
When news breaks that their old school friend Greta has died under mysterious circumstances, the past cracks open. Secrets they buried years ago begin to surface, pulling the trio across Ireland in search of answers. The cast expands with Natasha O’Keeffe, Emmett J. Scanlan, and a reunion with Derry Girls alum Saoirse‑Monica Jackson — a quiet wink to longtime fans.
A murder mystery on the surface, a friendship autopsy underneath
Yes, the show plays in the same sandbox as recent whodunnits — from Knives Out to the latest Agatha Christie adaptations — but the mystery is almost a decoy. What McGee is really dissecting is the strange, tender brutality of adult female friendship.
Saoirse, Robyn, and Dara’s shorthand is instantly recognisable: the eye rolls, the blunt truths, the way they drag each other through life’s wreckage with equal parts love and exasperation. It’s a far cry from the starry‑eyed optimism of Derry Girls, where the future was a horizon to run toward. Here, the future has arrived — and it’s complicated.
Robyn insists she’s fine in her marriage; her friends don’t buy it. Saoirse’s career sparkles; her friends see the cracks. Dara claims she’s trapped at home; her friends know she’s hiding.
This is the kind of friendship that only survives into adulthood if it evolves — where calling someone out isn’t cruelty but care, and where compassion sometimes arrives disguised as impatience.
The truth about growing up together — and growing apart
McGee captures something rarely shown on screen: the version of female friendship that exists after the glitter fades. Not the “best friends forever” mythology sold to teenage girls, but the real thing — the friendships that endure through marriages, divorces, disappointments, and the quiet grief of unmet expectations.
It’s messy. It’s unglamorous. It’s vital.
How To Get To Heaven From Belfast understands that the people who knew you at your most unformed can also be the ones who save you when adulthood becomes too heavy to carry alone.
SINON 