Blue Lights: The police drama hitting home in Northern Ireland

Blue Lights is filmed locally and on set in east Belfast you can spot the attention to detail, right down to the information leaflets at a police station reception area and case folders on officers’ desks.

“It’s really lovely just to see the amount of people who see themselves in the characters,” Devlin says.

“And [mention] how cofmplex the characters are. How real and human they are”.

It’s something McKinney considered in how she plays Aisling Byrne.

Aisling struggled with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the last series, something Dearbháile says she spoke to real-life officers about.

“They’ve had to witness some horrific things and been left with PTSD and trauma that they just have to learn to live with,” she says.

“It’s the reality here. It would be ignorant to not think about that.”

Aisling’s condition puts a strain on her relationship with Tommy Foster, played by Nathan Braniff, who is then faced with the decision whether to report her to their bosses so she can get help.

And while Braniff says Blue Lights often deals with heavy themes, he believes it does a good job at showing what Northern Ireland is really like.

“It shows that Northern Ireland’s moving forward and changing all the time.”