'Nothing to lose and nothing to prove': Aoife Dunne on how losing her mother shaped her future

Personal tragedy and self-doubt almost robbed Aoife Dunne of her childhood dream, but she overcame her fears and discovered a new side to herself on stage, writes Gemma Fullam

Comedian Aoife Dunne: "I approached it all with that level of fun and curiosity, which isn’t me; I’m an overthinker, I have ADHD, I’m extremely anxious. It was just this newfound confidence and a real fuck it attitude of ‘yeah, let’s see’.” Picture: 

In December 2010, as Ireland was blanketed in snow, 23-year-old Aoife Dunne was backpacking in South America. She was on a bus heading to Bolivia when her mobile rang. 

Expecting her mother, she answered with a cheery “Hi mom!”, only to hear the voice of a family friend who had devastating news to impart: “Your mom’s dead.” 

Dunne’s 53-year-old mother had died suddenly and unexpectedly from a rare, life-threatening condition in which a tear occurs in the wall of the aorta, the major artery to the heart.

Her father had left years before (she and he are now reconciled) so Dunne returned home to bury her mother and assume the role of de facto parent to her siblings. It is only in the last few years that the now 38-year-old has begun to come to terms with her grief.

Dunne, who has an arts degree and a master’s in human rights law, spent the years after her mother’s death trapped in “stuckness”. Now, finally, she’s unstuck, and living a creative life. 

She’s lately made waves online with her spoken-word piece about Conor McGregor, and is chasing her dreams again, too — her “one-woman show” at Whelans sold out in 24 hours.

It was privilege, or the perceived lack of it, that prevented her from fulfilling her childhood dream of becoming an actor, she says, and it was grief that then left her stagnant and stuck.

As a child, aware money was tight, she’d participated in free local drama and panto groups and, then, having “begged her mom”, attended a drama group in nearby Galway city.

“I was like, ‘this is my dream. This is what I want to do. I want to act’. I was surrounded by other people like Nicola [Coughlan of Bridgerton fame] who were like, ‘I’m going to act and we’re going to do this for the rest of our lives’.

Halfway through her arts degree, the amateur theatre company with which Dunne was involved won a competition to go to London. There, finding herself “surrounded by these people with privilege” she became despondent, feeling “family and money, and connections” were fundamental to pursuing acting.

“I was intimidated by privilege and the realisation that I don’t have that.” She came home, told her mother “I’m going to get a real job” and switched up her dream of drama for a master’s in human rights law.

Then, when she was 23, her mother died and inertia set in. “Then I didn’t do anything,” she says. “This was just further proof that I don’t get to participate in these dreams.” 

Dunne's show Good Grief, is funny, but it isn’t stand-up. It’s about losing her mother “and all the mistakes and all the ups and downs that define my whole life”. Picture: Sinead Murphy @sinead_murphy_photo.

Dunne drifted into “zero-hour contract jobs” that gave her “no security… no stability” and she felt “unable to make a decision”. She now knows this “survival mode” was down to grief, but she didn’t know that then.

She had a job teaching English to adults at a language school and was “cruising along”, albeit feeling “trapped” with “no confidence” in herself.

Then the pandemic happened and within the space of six months, Dunne found herself jobless, single, and homeless.

Such a series of life-changing events would prove challenging for anyone, but rather than crumbling, Dunne found an impetus to start afresh.

She began making language videos and posting them to her Instagram and slowly built “my own sort of online language school”.

She followed up with humorous grammar videos, which found an audience that extended beyond her language students, spurring her on to make “more comedy videos and more characters”. 

In the space of three years she amassed a following of 100k on Instagram.

Then, US-based Irish comic Katie Boyle of iconic New York venue, The Dead Rabbit, got in touch.

Boyle, Dunne says, “didn’t know that I wasn’t a comedian. She just saw ‘this girl has 100,000 followers’ and especially in America, that’s currency”. Boyle offered to fly Dunne to NY to headline a comedy lineup at The Dead Rabbit, and Dunne viewed the invite as “the universe telling me ‘say yes’”.

So she said yes, despite having no material and never having set foot on a stage as a stand up. Prior to heading Stateside she wangled 10-minute slots here and there, which went well, then “went to New York, did 20 minutes”.

The gig, which Dunne largely ad-libbed, was a success and afterwards she came clean to an unfazed Boyle.

“I had nothing to lose and nothing to prove,” she says now of the casualness with which she viewed the opportunity.

I thought it was just a big joke. I also think when your mom dies suddenly and you get through that and you get through your boyfriend breaking up with you and losing your job, I think I was like, ‘none of this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, so if it all fails, I don’t care’.

“I approached it all with that level of fun and curiosity, which isn’t me; I’m an overthinker, I have ADHD, I’m extremely anxious. It was just this newfound confidence and a real fuck it attitude of ‘yeah, let’s see’.”

On stage, Dunne has rediscovered the little girl who loved to perform, as well as “this other animal” who is, she says, “a part of me I would love to be in real life. She is ballsy, confident, throws caution to the wind, and is a risk taker.”

“I was seeing all this hate, or mostly I was seeing hopelessness. People were like, ‘it’s fucked. Conor’s just spoken for the whole country now and this is what we are’.” Her spoken word piece was written as a response to that. She says: “I’m like, ‘this is not what we are’.” Picture: Sinead Murphy @sinead_murphy_photo.

She’s "this girl that I wish existed when I went to London and told myself ‘I can’t be an actress, I’m not good enough for this’. I’ve always bullied myself out of situations that I deserve to be in because of insecurity and lack of confidence and lack of self-worth. This girl that exists on stage, she’s not like that. She’s ‘I deserve to be here’. And then I get off stage and it’s back to me going, ‘Was this shit? Am I awful? Everyone hates me’.”

Her show, Good Grief, is funny, but it isn’t stand-up. It’s about losing her mother “and all the mistakes and all the ups and downs that define my whole life”.

She hasn’t been signed by an agent yet, which she feels may be because, “I’m mouthy”. 

Her mouthiness attracted a lot of attention recently when she posted a spoken word piece to social media in response to comments Conor McGregor made in the White House on St Patrick’s Day.

The MMA fighter said he was in DC “to raise the issues the people of Ireland face”, that “Ireland is on the cusp of losing its Irishness” and an “illegal immigration racket” was “running ravage [sic] on the country”.

Her spoken word piece isn’t, she says, a polemic against McGregor, rather, “It’s what he represents. He’s just a product of this new Ireland that I’m seeing emerge.”

She points to increasingly polarised viewpoints, like in the US; the “manosphere. That we see happening everywhere”; the prevalence of “hopelessness and apathy”.

“I was seeing all this hate, or mostly I was seeing hopelessness. People were like, ‘it’s fucked. Conor’s just spoken for the whole country now and this is what we are’.” Her spoken word piece was written as a response to that. She says: “I’m like, ‘this is not what we are’.” She knows it’s not, because she’s lived it.

When her family moved to rural Ireland in the ’90s, Dunne says they were met with suspicion, as they were “hippies” with “hair down to their bottoms”.

Her mother countered the locals’ misgivings “with buns and flapjacks and love and warmth and by the end of it sure they fucking loved her”.

When 23-year-old Dunne returned for her mother’s funeral, all along the snowy rural road “every house had put candles on the wall to guide me home”.

The support from her local community “was a real indication of how politics and the stuff we say and the opinions that we think matter fall apart and fall away and dissolve when shit really matters,” she says.

And so I think giving people hope and reasons to love and reasons to believe is so much more important than giving people reasons to hate. That’s what I try to do at my show. I try to do that with my poems.

Dunne got thousands of messages in response to the spoken word piece but those messages didn’t say “fuck Conor McGregor. That’s not what people took away from it,” she says.

“They took away, ‘I needed a reason to love Ireland again, and thank you for reminding me what Ireland is about’.”

Instagram: @aoife_is_never_dunne

Conor McGregor is not Irish by Aoife Dunne

Irish is not this. It is not his. Fuck the ‘Kiss Me, I'm Irish’, the drinking, the drunk gestures. I'm tired of it. The paddywhackery that our oppressors tried to perpetuate about us because they feared our greatness. So they tried to reduce us, to numb us. But the thing about the Irish is we will always find a way to be free.

I remember hearing the words, Yes For Equality. As we stood hand in hand outside Dublin Castle on the same cobblestones where our colonizers murdered those who fought for our freedom. The fighting Irish, we aren't talking about McGregor and all the other gombeens who are busy making money off the backs of the broken men and women down the country.

You say rural Ireland is ravaged? Yes. You're right, Conor, but not by immigrants. No by men exactly like you who are destitute of any scruples or morals. Who would rather rape and beat and steal and cheat, than fight for what really matters. Our teanga, our ceol, our sport, our art and culture, the poetry, the country, our ash trees, our water, our oceans, the people who need us, who came here to help us, who take care of our grannies and drive our taxis.

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They don't scare me, but you do. Men just like you, who prey on communities grappling with intergenerational trauma and poverty that need unity, but you'd rather divide and conquer, just like our coloniser. 

And when you've angered some lost boys enough, you'll walk away because, really, you don't care about what they have to say about their pain or where they sleep. At the end of the day, you're only out for yourself. A true gombeen, not a real Irish man. 

You see, Irish isn't a passport. It's not a title given. It doesn't depend on some arbitrary bloodline or your surname. Irish is an adjective. It describes a person who believes in freedom, who lives close to the land, to music, to its people.

It describes a feeling. Of warmth when you're wrapped around a fire together, singing despite the cold outside. Irish is ‘everyone is welcome’ because we know what it's like to be held from what we hold dear. We know what it's like to hold fear and be locked up on your own land. Irish is, don't worry, it'll be grand.

Irish means intelligence. It's learned women and men who use their mind and their pen to write the wrongs of their oppressors. It's years of stories and poetry to weed out the darkness and finally set us free. Irish is language. A heartbeat that nearly stopped were not for a few of us who knew is fearr Gaeilge bhriste ná Béarla cliste.

Irish is a fight, but not whatever shite Conor does in his little cage. I'm talking about what we fought for, how we keep bringing the oppressors down to their knees over and over. The British, the church. And now these genocidists, these imperialists. Take your shackles, colonisers. Because we Irish have tasted freedom and we will never feast on anything less.

It burns through our fists and our chest. So, Conor, you're not one of us. You don't know what it means to be Irish. Being Irish is nothing of what you speak about when you're over in your precious White House. The real Irish will still be here fighting for everything we hold dear.