Tommy Tiernan Show recap: Patrick Kielty on 'burying' his grief after father shot dead
Patrick Kielty on the Tommy Tiernan Show
Saturday night’s episode of the Tommy Tiernan Show touched upon topics including grief, miscarriage and an incredible transplant story.
First up, Co Down comedian Patrick Kielty spoke about his father’s death in 1988. His father, Jack, was shot dead by loyalist paramilitary group the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) shortly before Kielty’s 17th birthday.
The comedian said he found it difficult to process his grief at the time, because despite being a child, he felt he was being treated as an adult by the community.
“You were part of a community that was telling you, ‘you boys have to look after your mother’ and ‘you are men’,” he recalled. He said it was an unnatural situation but one that was common for many families in the North at that time.
“It wasn't normal, I know that now, but up there at that time it wasn't special. The one thing that I didn't want to do was I didn't want to make a big deal of that. If you're standing on a stage in front of people who potentially have been through a hell of a lot worse than you've been through — and some of the stuff that was going on up there was worse than what I went through.”
“I think that I thought I was dealing with it.”@patrickielty tells @Tommedian about the experience of his father being shot dead when he was aged just 16#TommyTiernanShow pic.twitter.com/ShRb1uHN0N
— RTÉ One (@RTEOne) January 14, 2023
When the host pointed out that Kielty was just a child at the time, he replied: “But I didn’t know I was.” He said he has only processed his grief in recent years as he worked on documentaries but he believes ‘burying’ his grief was a coping mechanism.
“At the time, I thought I was okay. There’s stuff that you deal with in a certain way and I think sometimes when it comes to grief, when it comes to trauma, I think that forgetting about it and burying it sometimes gets a bad press.
“I think sometimes you do have to bury stuff a wee bit and keep the wheels turning and put one foot in front of the other. That's the brain and the human heart’s way of saying to you ‘we haven't forgot about this, chuck that in the minutes of the meeting, we'll come back to that. But you're going to have to do this to get through this.”
The second guest was the world’s first double-arm transplant recipient, Felix Gretarsson. Gretarsson lost both of his arms while working as an electrician in his home country of Iceland in 1998. He was burned when he accidentally grabbed powerlines and “woke up three months later with no arms”.
Gretarsson told Tiernan that he became addicted to drugs after his amputation and later underwent two liver transplants. “Reality kicked in and I found the solution to my misery and that was drugs,” he explained.
“[It came] to the point that there was nothing to be done except a liver transplant. But the problem was if you are an addict, you don't get a liver transplant. That was the moment for me where everything's changed.”
A French surgeon later agreed to consider his for arm transplant surgery and a suitable donor was found in January 2021.
“I see myself as the luckiest man alive because on January 12, 2021 I walked into a hospital and got transplanted with these two French arms,” he said.
Finally, Tiernan was joined by cookbook writers Gina and Karol Daly of the Daly Dish, who discussed releasing their first cookbook on the day lockdown started in March 2020, Gina learning of a missed miscarriage in 2021 and the birth of their youngest son Gene, who they describe as “our rainbow with an extra colour”.
Gina told Tiernan she discovered she was pregnant in 20201 but at a scan was told her body was going through a missed miscarriage.
“My body keeps thinking I'm pregnant, but I miscarried. My body won't let go of the pregnancy,” she explained. She said she had a medically-induced miscarriage and they later decided to try for another baby, learning six months later that they were expecting again.
When baby Gene was born, Gina said: “When I looked at him, I just knew the second I laid eyes on him that he had Down syndrome.”
Karol and Gina described their son as “the best thing that ever happened to us”.
“Our little Gene. Here's the light of our life, he’s a rainbow with an extra colour and he was born with an extra chromosome of awesomeness.”
