Culture That Made Me: Fair City actor Liam Carney picks his touchstones
Liam Carney, Fair City actor.
Born in 1960, Liam Carney grew up in Ballymun, Dublin. In 1986, he joined Paul Mercier’s Passion Machine Theatre Company. His first break on television came in 1989 with a role on His screen credits also include and He joined cast as the property developer Con Rafferty in 2022. In 2024, he was nominated for an Ifta for his performance in the drama . is on four nights a week on RTÉ One.
I love Seán O'Casey's plays — and I love his language, the structure of them and the history in them. They capture the era, the political and social state that the country was in at the time. They're particularly specific. They're fantastic records. I've seen each of them a couple of times. He also gives a very balanced view [of Ireland’s revolutionary years]. You get a sense of both sides.
A stage performance I remember well was the late Seán Rocks, the Lord have mercy on him, in Frank Pig Says Hello. It was incredible. It was an adaptation of Pat McCabe’s The Butcher Boy in 1992. He played a number of different characters. He was so entertaining, so off the wall. I left the theatre on a high. He was a wonderful actor before he went into radio.
Another memorable performance was Donal O’Kelly's one-man show I saw it in Dublin’s old Andrew's Lane Theatre. I wasn't aware of the story of the ship, the Catalpa, the history of it, which involved a daring rescue of Fenian prisoners from a British penal colony in Western Australia in the 19th century. For one man to do what he did was extraordinary because Donal O’Kelly devised it as well. He was one man on stage with a sheet; you saw the ship, you saw everything. It was mind-blowing the images he could create, the story he could convey on his own.
Growing up, I started listening to Kris Kristofferson. I love him. I've seen him live, and I saw The Highwayman — with himself, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings — in The Point in Dublin. It was an incredible gig. I'm too cool for school when I’m out in the public normally, but Willie Nelson threw his cowboy hat from the stage. I was standing on my tippy toes, but I didn't catch it, unfortunately. I was two inches away from catching Willie Nelson’s battered cowboy hat!
I saw Queen at Slane Castle in 1986. That was my first real concert. It wasn't a great day. It was a bit rainy. It was a bus out there and a late bus to go home, but I loved it. I went with a girl. We had a good day. She was a cracker, so that helped as well. I think I got my first kiss listening to — not at that concert, this was back in the ’70s. So that might be in there as well, very deep in the brain and the memory.
Paul Mercier is one of my favourite playwrights. I did a lot of work with him at Passion Machine — from to so many. He had a huge catalogue of work. They were vast productions. All the plays are so different. in 1989 was an incredible play I was in with Brendan Gleeson and Gerry Byrne.
It was a huge cast — 15 of us. It was very successful. It was about a house of bedsits in Dublin in the ’80s, and rows over a vacuum cleaner and whatnot. It was set in a four-story house. The main set was the attic room. The set design, by Anne Gateley, was incredible. It was very believable dialogue, very Dublinesque. It was hilarious.
I remember one night a door on the stage got stuck. We’d been warning the crew: “This is getting stuck.” One night, Brandan Gleeson tried to go out the door and he couldn't. So, he had to put a shoulder to it and the whole frame came out. He just picked it up and left it at the back wall and turned back to Gerry Byrne who was doing the scene with him and said, “You'd want to get that door fixed.”
The audience went into uproar. When everything calmed down, and Gerry Byrne got his act together, a couple of lines later he had to say, to Aisling Tóibín, “All I ever wanted was my own front door.” That line, on that particular night, really wrung out.
I loved a black-and-white French film which came out in 1995. A friend of mine said, “You have to see it.” So, he went again with me. I was delighted to see it in the cinema — at the old Screen cinema in College Green.
As its main characters, one was an Arab, one was black and one Caucasian. It's like an odyssey that takes place over 24 hours. They're looking to buy drugs. They meet different people along the way, different head cases. I remember getting a sense that these were good guys. These weren't bad guys. They were a product of the society they lived in, a high-rise complex in the Paris suburbs. I loved the ending of it.
There was a fantastic TV series in the late ’70s — which goes back to my interest in Native Americans — called There were 12 one-hour episodes. They were based on James A Michener’s novel The book is about the history of America. It begins around the formation of the Earth. It describes how the mountains and plains are created. It goes through the anthropology of the animals, from dinosaurs up to horses. The TV series is mainly set during the exploration of North America by French and British trappers. I loved it.
I love Mark Twain. One of the first books I read in primary school were I remember loving them. I re-read them recently; I fell in love with them again. A couple of years ago, an American author, Percival Everett, wrote a book called which tells their story from the perspective of the negro slave. I loved it.
Kent Haruf is an American writer. He wrote a series of books — titles such as and — set around this tiny, sleepy town called Holt in Colorado where nothing ever happens, and not an awful lot happens in the books, but I remember on more than one occasion reading them on a train or a bus and the tears streaming down my face because they get very involved. I found them very emotive, beautiful books.
is the first James Frey book I read. It's written as a memoir. A while after reading it, I heard he'd been hauled over the coals because some characters were fictional. He got a grilling by Oprah on her show. I thought it was very unfair and irrelevant because I thoroughly enjoyed it; I didn’t care if some characters were made up. I went on to read everything I could find by him and loved them all.
