This year Cillian Murphy completed a momentous decade, as he saw off the sixth and final series of Peaky Blinders. The Irish star’s turn as Tommy Shelby in the 1920s crime saga has been a career-defining role, with the show spawning a proliferation of fan fiction, tribute nights and sharp haircuts; a film should begin production next year. Yet it was also about a decade ago that Murphy became aware of the work of the Unesco Child and Family Research Centre at the University of Galway, which champions empathy in education. Working with Unesco’s Pat Dolan, he has co-edited a new book of essays promoting Ionbhá – “empathy” in Irish – and has managed to get the subject onto the curriculum of 150 Irish schools, with a practical programme attached – but he doesn’t plan on stopping there.
“We see it as a worldwide project,” says the 46-year-old, his Cork accent still strong; he and his artist wife Yvonne McGuinness returned to Ireland after a long spell in Britain to live in Dublin with their two sons in 2015. “There’s an awful lot of interest in it, and I think it’s a critical time for something like this.” The world, he says, is ever more polarised and social media has made things worse: “It’s very emotionally draining for children or for young people. It takes a lot out of them to be under scrutiny all the time – I can’t really imagine that.”