Colm Meaney: the actor Ireland claimed back from Star Trek

For five decades he has lived inside two careers at the same time — one in the Federation, one in Dublin — and the second one has finally won. The IFTA Lifetime Achievement Award in February confirmed what Irish audiences always knew: the most loved Star Trek face is theirs.

There is a particular kind of working man Colm Meaney has spent fifty years making believable. He turns up in a uniform or a jacket, takes a seat, and the room rearranges around him. He says the line that ends the argument and then — very importantly — drinks. Other Irish actors of his generation found their way into the world by leaving it; Meaney’s trick was to make the place he came from go everywhere with him. The accent never softened. The walk never lengthened. By the time he was nominated for a Golden Globe in his forties, he had already been on a Federation starship for half a decade and on the Dublin stage for two — and he was still recognisably the same man.

The starting point was Glasnevin, a working-class neighbourhood on Dublin’s north side, and a father who drove a van for the Johnston, Mooney & O’Brien bakery. Meaney decided he wanted to act when he was fourteen, which is unusual; what is more unusual is that the decision held. After secondary school he enrolled at the Abbey Theatre School of Acting, the workshop attached to Ireland’s national theatre, and from there he joined the company. Eight years on the road in England followed, much of it with 7:84, the leftist touring troupe whose name was a piece of arithmetic — seven per cent of the population owned eighty-four per cent of the wealth — and whose politics never left him. He moved to New York’s Hell’s Kitchen in the early eighties and from there to Los Angeles, where he made a feature debut in a forgettable thriller and then a career-defining one in John Huston’s last film, The Dead, the 1987 adaptation of Joyce.

What happened next was both a windfall and a confinement. In the same year Meaney was cast as a transporter chief in the pilot of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The role was meant to be one episode. It became fifty-two, and then a starring transfer to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, where Chief Miles O’Brien — the engineer with the family, the temper, and the off-duty pint — anchored seven seasons. By the time Meaney walked off the station in 1999 he had appeared in 211 Star Trek episodes, more than any actor in the franchise except Michael Dorn. He is the only person to feature in both the pilots and the final episodes of TNG and DS9. None of the writers ever quite worked out how to break him; their solution was to keep trying, which became an in-joke called “O’Brien Must Suffer” episodes.

What he did with the windfall was the more revealing thing. While Hollywood used him for character work in Die Hard 2, Under Siege, Far and Away, The Last of the Mohicans and Con Air, Meaney went home in the off-seasons and made what now looks like the most quietly important Irish film cycle of the nineties. Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown trilogy — The Commitments under Alan Parker, then Stephen Frears’s The Snapper and The Van — gave him three variations on the same Dublin patriarch and a Best Actor nomination at the Golden Globes for The Snapper. The accent was finally being used for what it had always been for. After Star Trek, the work kept coming and refused to rhyme: Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake opposite Daniel Craig, the railroad villain Thomas Durant across five seasons of AMC’s Hell on Wheels, Father Francis Morgan in Tolkien, the manager in The Damned United, the hesitant gangster boss in Gangs of London.

The conversation about Meaney’s career is rarely about Meaney. It is almost always about Star Trek’s reach — the conventions, the fan circuits, the way one syndicated franchise eats a working actor’s identity for thirty years. That conversation undersells him. Watch him as Martin McGuinness opposite Timothy Spall’s Ian Paisley in The Journey, the 2016 reconstruction of the unlikeliest car ride in Northern Irish politics, and the doubleness becomes obvious. Meaney is playing a man who spent decades being demonised in British headlines and asking the audience to see him plain. He won the IFTA Best Actor for it. The more accurate framing is the simpler one: he is one of the great supporting actors of his generation, and Ireland has been quieter about it than it should have been.

That has now been formally corrected. In February 2025 Meaney received the IFTA Lifetime Achievement Award at the Dublin Royal Convention Centre, joining a list that runs from Maureen O’Hara to Judi Dench. The same month his Irish thriller Bring Them Down opened in cinemas, with Barry Keoghan in the lead. Robert Lorenz’s In the Land of Saints and Sinners, in which he played a small-town garda alongside Liam Neeson, had already restated the case in 2023. In April 2026 RTÉ and ITV announced The Yank, a six-part Connemara-set crime series in which Meaney plays opposite Kate Mulgrew — a Star Trek captain reuniting with a Star Trek chief on Irish soil, the joke writing itself. Filming began in Galway last month. Remarkably Bright Creatures, a screen adaptation of the bestselling novel, is also on his slate.

Meaney has been married to Ines Glorian since 2007, lives between Mallorca and Ireland, has a daughter from each marriage, and remains one of the most reliably outspoken Irish public voices on social and political questions — a habit that grows directly from those 7:84 touring years. He is seventy-two and has, by any reading, the busiest year of his late career under way. The IFTA citation called him a man with a one-of-a-kind warmth and roguish persona. Both halves of that are true. The roguish part has been doing a lot of the work for fifty years.