An Irish Goodbye: Director Ross White says that having Oscar in Northern Ireland brings home the reality what they've achieved

Ross White was at City Hall this morning with two of the film’s stars – James Martin and Paddy Jenkins – after receiving an invite from the mayor, Tina Black.

He said: “We’ve been blown away by it. We were in LA with the Oscar and that was fine, but now we have it in Belfast that really brings it home what we’ve done.

“Belfast has become this amazing place for film and TV and to be from here, making stuff here, it’s a real honour."

He said that after they were announced as winners for Best Live Short Action Film it became a bit of a blur: “The last thing I remember is we were walking down the aisle and (Irish actor) Paul Mescal turned to us and went, ‘well done lads’. I don’t remember being up on stage. Thankfully there’s loads of photos and videos so I know I was actually there.”

James, who plays Lorcan in the film written by Ross along with Tom Berkeley, is first person with Down's syndrome to win an Academy Award,.

He said: “It’s just nice to make the Guinness World Record Book, to go this high, it’s been a fantastic achievement.

"Plus to have my birthday on the same day as the Oscar. Everyone singing Happy Birthday’, that went viral. It was just fantastic.”

At the homecoming party last week, James and his dad Ivan shared an emotional embrace.

Broadcaster Ivan said today: “That was a poignant moment. I hadn’t seen him for nearly two weeks which is probably the longest amount of time that I’ve been separated from him since he was born.”

Paddy Jenkins plays Father O'Shea in the short film and is also well known as Pastor Begbie in Give My Head Peace. He joked: “That’s me, anything with a collar, as long as it doesn’t have a lead attached to it.”

The Belfast man, who started his acting career in 1976, said: “As someone quite poignantly put in one of the cards that I received – it takes many, many years to become an overnight success.”

Discussing future plans, Ross said he hoped the Oscar would make his job easier given that ‘An Irish Goodbye’ was made possible thanks to a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter.

The former pupil of Orangefield Primary School and Grosvenor Grammar School said: “Myself and my collaborator Tom, we’ve worked together for a few films now and we’ll keep doing that. We’ve one more short that’s coming out later this year but then we’ll have to lock ourselves in a room and write the big feature.

“In terms of the approach I hope it will make it a bit easier for us to get films made, but it shouldn’t really change our creative process – we love our writing, we love finding great actors to bring the words to life – if we can keep doing that, it seems to be working out okay so far.”