West is the best for Tommy Tiernan on his new TV show

On his Epic West series, Tommy Tiernan travels Ireland's Atlantic seaboard showing off its powerful beauty and chatting to locals along the way

Tommy Tiernan presents the two episodes of Epic West on RTÉ One. 

When Tommy Tiernan was a boarder at Garbally College in Galway, there was a time when he would cycle to St Brigid’s Psychiatric Hospital in Ballinasloe and sit and talk for 45 minutes with “auld lads” once or twice a week.

“It was an odd thing to let a 16-year-old boy do,” he muses, recalling how he had volunteered for it as part of the pupils’ outreach programme with the St Vincent de Paul Society.