Tommy Tiernan Show review: Christmas special explores racism, sectarianism and song
Tommy Tiernan Show Christmas Special
The Tommy Tiernan Show never fails to incite conversation across the nation and its Christmas special is no exception.
The comic was first joined on Monday night by Cork singer-songwriter John Spillane who spoke about life on the road as he gigs around the country. Spillane performs around three nights a week across ireland.
“It's a beautiful life, and it's really wonderful. I feel extremely lucky to do it,” he says, adding his travels have helped his songwriting.
“I started writing songs when I was 16 and so far I've written about 206 songs and an opera. Of the 206 songs, about 125 of them have a place in them. It started with Cork, writing about Cork.”
Spillane became a full-time musician at 19 and he jokes that his mother only forgave him for leaving his permanent job in a bank decades later when he was on the Late Late Show and she met its iconic host.
“I did break her heart when I left the bank, like. But about 25 years later when I got on the Late Late Show nand she met Gay Byrne she started to come around a small bit”
Next was Glasgow-born lecturer Amanullah De Sondy, who is Head of Religions at University College Cork. De Sondy spoke about the heartbreaking experiences of racism he hears from students at the college.
“We are getting to the stage where we need to talk about racism and strengthening and emboldening our Ireland to be more anti-racist,” he says.
“A lot of people - staff and students - have come up to me and talked about the really horrific racism. The university has been proactive and set up a race equality forum, and I'm the chair of that. We basically try to find ways to strengthen diversity and inclusion at the university.
“But it's sad, it breaks my heart to see and hear some of the stories that some of our black, Asian, minority, ethnic folk are going through. We've had Asian students who have been told that they are the reason for the virus. It's really painful. For me, the reason why I do this is because I've received racism in my life as well.”
Finally, civil rights leader and former politician Bernadette McAliskey, neé Devlin, spoke passionately about life for Catholics in Northern Ireland and why she feels the north has been failed over and over by the southern state.
“The northern Catholic was and still is looked on by the southern state as ‘not worth the trouble’,” she says, adding that she believes Brexit is the beginning of the end for Britain and a new Ireland may emerge from its ashes.
“I do believe historically, from David Cameron to Boris Johnson will go down as the period in which the United Kingdom was finally dissolved. Brexit will be historically remembered as a trigger point. That's not to say it will happen tomorrow, but it is broken. The myth of the United Kingdom is broken. The end of the British Empire is nigh.
“What's fundamentally important at the minute for us on this island is not to repeat the mistake of Brexit, which is to ask people to vote for something they don't understand. There has to be a conversation on this island: what will happen as this denouement takes place, what will happen as Great Britain crumbles into the cliffs of Dover to become England, Scotland, Wales, and what?
“And so the future of the people on this island is a conversation to be started. This whole island has to change if there's to be room for everybody in it.”
