Stephen Tompkinson and Dervla Kirwan engaged in 1997, split in 1999

Stephen Tompkinson and Dervla Kirwan turned a Ballykissangel partnership into a real-life engagement in 1997, after meeting on the series in 1994. Their relationship ended suddenly in 1999, closing a four-and-a-half-year period that had tracked alongside two more joint projects.

Ballykissangel in 1994

Tompkinson and Kirwan first met in 1994 while playing Father Peter Clifford and Assumpta Fitzgerald. The pairing gave Ballykissangel one of its most closely watched off-screen story lines, and the engagement that followed in 1997 made the relationship part of the show’s wider public narrative.

That history is being revisited now because Tompkinson is back on screen in the new Channel 5 thriller The Fortune, where he plays Boots Maddison. The timing pulls a long-running piece of television history back into view, not because the relationship is new, but because the cast connection was built while the two actors were working together at the center of a hit series.

1999 split and two reunions

Kirwan later said, “It was really upsetting when Stephen and I split up after four and a half years.” She also said, “I felt terrified and vulnerable and a big failure because I'd been so deeply in love with the man.” Those remarks point to the personal cost of a breakup that arrived just as both careers were moving forward.

The split did not end their professional overlap. The pair worked together on two more projects, one around the time of their 1999 breakup and another in 2001, which is the part of the timeline that complicates the usual clean break narrative. They were able to keep appearing on the same credits even after the engagement collapsed.

Kirwan after the break

Kirwan later married actor Rupert Penry-Jones and has two children with him. That detail closes the relationship arc around a former on-set pairing that moved from 1994 meeting to 1997 engagement to a 1999 split, then into separate personal and professional paths.

For readers following Tompkinson through The Fortune, the useful takeaway is simple: the relationship history is fixed by date, not rumor. It began on Ballykissangel, peaked with the 1997 engagement, and ended in 1999, with two later work reunions showing that the split did not immediately cut off their professional lives.