Tommy Tiernan Show recap: A ‘former neo Nazi’ on his work against fascism and racism
Matthew Collins told the Tommy Tiernan Show he is 'a former neo Nazi who changed sides and went to work for the opposition'
Tommy Tiernan welcomed a wide range of guests on his chat show on Saturday night, with first guest Dara Ó Briain sharing details about his own adoption and his quest to find his birth mother.
Ó Briain’s adoption is detailed in his current ‘So… Where Were We’ tour and he shared the tale in Cork last summer at his Live at the Marquee gig. He told the Tommy Tiernan Show it is a different format of storytelling than he usually shares at his comedy gigs.
He noted: “I'm 104 dates into a tour in which there are 70 dates still to go and I've never shaken the sense that this could be really indulgent.”
He described the difficulties of finding his birth mother, including receiving redated paperwork as well as his first stumbling block: forgetting he was adopted.
He said he had a “general sense” that he was adopted as his parents told him he was when he was young, but he asked his father to confirm it in recent years.
“He said ‘we just got bored of telling you’,” Ó Briain said. “At some point there’s a cut-off point [of mentioning the adoption] but then it drifts into this half-remembered thing.”
He said he never felt the urge to reconnect with his birth mother until he saw the film Philomena and he realised there might be a woman wondering about the baby she put up for adoption as he was adopted out of a home.
“I felt an obligation to let this person know that it had worked out okay,” he said.
Ó Briain said he is now in touch with his birth mother as well as his half-siblings.
Tiernan’s second guest was activist Matthew Collins, who introduced himself as “a former neo Nazi who changed sides and went to work for the opposition”.
Collins said his work against fascism helped to stop an MP and a policewoman from being murdered in 2017 and his story is the premise of the television show The Walk-In, which stars Stephen Graham as Collins.
Having grown up in South London in the 1970s, Collins says he developed racist views from a young age and joined the National Front, the British National Party and Combat 18.
He said his views changed after he was involved in “a particularly disgusting, violent incident” in which he was part of an attack on a group of women in a library.
“It was halfway through that I thought, this is not going to get me anywhere, this is not the solution,” he said. “The next day, I made contacts with anti-fascists.”
Collins said he does not seek forgiveness for the violence in his past. “I'm not driven by wanting to be forgiven. I'm driven by a genuine desire to get rid of these racists and these fascists out of Britain.”
He said he received death threats as a result of his work and his mother and family have been threatened with sexual assault.
Collins said he thinks fascism and racism are getting worse and he said Ireland is seeing some of the same behaviour. “You've got people here in Ireland saying the same things, standing outside hotels. I think the issues in Ireland [that can lead to people becoming racist] are pretty similar: housing shortages, stuff like that.”
Finally, Tiernan spoke to Rebecca de Havilland, the first person in Ireland to undergo gender-affirming surgery.
de Havilland spoke about her transition in 1991, as well as how she overcame addiction, sexual assault and an Aids diagnosis.
She said she was “pretty hounded by the press” at the time of her transition. “When you go through so much trauma and tragedy in your life, the only thing I ever wanted to be was myself and I had to pay the highest price for that,” she said.
Looking back on her childhood, de Havilland said she was sexually abused while at boarding school between the ages of seven and 12 but felt a sense of freedom when she started secondary school. “I got my own power back to some degree, the abuse was over.”
Describing her life pre-transition, de Havilland said being in a body that feels wrong is “probably your worst nightmare but you can't wake up”. After she sought surgery she discovered she had Aids and was given two years to live.
“I had all my surgery operations before there was even any HIV medication and the only thing I can put down to how I survived that was the will to be me.”
However, she said she suffered from PTSD, turned to drugs and alcohol and struggled with her mental health. She said she ended up on life-support in a London hospital after a suicide attempt.
She said she decided to change her life after she was sectioned in a mental institution. She is 17 years sober next month and works to help others going through transitions.
“I work at 56 Dean Street, which is part of Chelsea and Westminster hospital. Now we are doing transition operations there. I'm working in the hospital where I was on a life support machine 17 years ago.”
Noting how many obstacles de Havilland overcame in her journey, Tiernan described it as an “amazing story” and remarked: “I feel like you're taking me through the 12 Stations of the Cross.”
