Tommy Tiernan’s Epic West review: Beauty, philosophy, and a sup of poitín
Tommy Tiernan's Epic West
“We’re strange creatures,” Tommy Tiernan observes in the second episode of RTÉ’s two-parter, Tommy Tiernan’s Epic West. He’s at a holy well in the Burren, surveying mementos people have left behind – a white shell, rosary beads, woven rings.
Deftly poetic, Tiernan surmises: “We’re the spirit monkeys of the world – half here, half somewhere else.”
One of the show’s central themes is: where we feel at home in the world, our relationship to place, is there a place that’s ours?
Tiernan has lived in the West for 30 years, wants his ashes spread on Galway Bay, but still isn’t sure why he feels at home “in the half-barren landscapes of the West”.
He tells poet Mary O’Malley he doesn’t feel he belongs like a native person belongs. It’s “as if I’m some sort of East Coast imposter”.
Yet whenever he arrives on Inis Oírr, a man shakes his hand, says ‘Fáilte Abhaile’ – it makes Tiernan “happy inside”.
He meets today’s West-based artists: Blindboy Boatclub, Ger Sweeney, Niall Henry of Blue Raincoat Theatre Company, and weaves in scenes from films – Poitín and Song of Granite.
He also explores Tim Robinson writings, and the art of Cork woman Dorothy Cross.
His own, most comfortable, response to the West’s intense beauty is to simply behold it.
He conveys a sense of being let off the hook – in the West, you don’t have to think or do, just be. In the Burren’s rocky expanse, he finds the “silence of great places opens up a silence in you… it does your thinking for you”.
Is there anything ugly in nature, he muses, among rocks that remind him of wrinkled lines on an old person’s face, of an elephant in India.
Then, hearing birdsong, he feels “the biggest mistake people ever made was to start talking. Here’s me waffling… the birds are having the craic… Just shut up”.
Tiernan’s response to the West is one of wonderment, but he doesn’t romanticise it. He sees the now-disused mental hospital at Ballinasloe (“One of the great haunted places of Ireland, so many souls were suffering here”), as a reminder: “We weren’t always nice to each other”.
There are great flashes of Tommy Tiernan fun. Drinking poitín on a desolate roadside: “Oh that’s gorgeous lads… it’s kind of drinky and sweet at the same time. Oh I do feel like lying down in a field.”
Tommy Tiernan happens to be a comedian, but in rendering the West, he could be a poet, a philosopher – maybe even a sporadic but entirely-at-home inhabitant of a contemplative order.
Thought-provoking, art-appreciating, wickedly funny at times and deeply spiritual, Tommy Tiernan’s Epic West traverses a wide territory, not just of the West, but of what it means to be human.
- Both episodes of Tommy Tiernan’s Epic West are available to watch on the RTÉ Player
