Patrick Kielty has told how his black humour on The Troubles failed to raise laughs on his first ever appearance on the Late Late Show with Gay Byrne.
He said it was a lightbulb moment as his edgy material – which involved props like a balaclava, a bag of fake Semtex, and a fake gun – was a hit north of the border.
“I died on my ass,” he said, referring to his stand-up routine as a 21-year-old on the Late Late Show as part of a national comedy competition.
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Kielty admitted: “That was the first time that I realised that there was a disconnect and the difference between the lives that people in the south were living and people in the north were living.”
He said there was “very little whimsy” in his routine. “The early 90s in Northern Ireland was grim, and whilst a new generation of comedians like me were trying to make sense of the conflict by finding the absurdity in it all, it affected us all, whether we thought it did or not.”
Growing up in Dundrum, Co Down, he considered himself to have grown up in an “Irish household”. He said: “We played Gaelic football. Gaelic football is a 32-county all-Ireland organisation. So in your head, you felt that you were part of Ireland. And why wouldn’t you be part of Ireland?
“And then to go to the capital of Ireland and to do material which seemed to be working on one part of the island and for that audience to go ‘what is going on here?’ I would say they were trying to get out of the studio, it wasn’t pretty.”
On Friday nights his family would tune in to the RTÉ One chat show he now hosts. Kielty was only 16 when his dad, Jack Kielty, was assassinated by loyalist paramilitaries after he refused to pay protection money in 1988.
A few years later, he was on the stand-up circuit in Belfast hitting a chord with audiences by finding grim humour around what became known as The Troubles.
Looking back now he describes a collective survival mode in the North at the time with so many lives shattered by the conflict. “With the passing of time, you realise that you were living through trauma, and you were living with trauma, and there were so many other people who were living with a similar trauma.
“Whenever you actually try to work out and calibrate, ‘Well, where does the horror that was visited on my family kind of sit with pretty much everybody else?’ Oh, no, you went through that, you went through that... you went through... Yeah, OK, we’ve all been through it,” he said, adding that it didn’t “set you apart”.
“I think the trauma, and the human brain, does a brilliant thing. In order to survive and in order to move forward and in order to keep going, all of the stuff that you can look at now and say ‘that was terrible’, you actually paper over the cracks and move on and thank God you were able to put one foot in front of another.”
In a new BBC4 documentary, he delves into the hope and optimism starting to bubble up on both sides of the border around that time with the excitement around the national soccer team and emerging musical superstars.
“I don’t think you can underestimate the importance of U2 in this at that time, because if you look at the early 90s, the biggest rock group in the world were Irish.”
The hour-long show examines seismic cultural moments like The Commitments and Riverdance of that year which helped build an “Irish swagger”. He also points to the coining of the term Celtic Tiger in 1994.
He believes the English fail to grasp the importance of Ireland’s soft power in turbo-boosting the Irish economy in the early 90s.
“There seems to be this idea that, well, Ireland joined the EU because Ireland was a poor country. ‘They got all our taxes, and so we paid into the EU as Brits, and then they built all the roads and infrastructure, and we essentially paid for the development of their country’.
“What they completely forget about is the story of Ireland and America, and the link between those two countries, and the amount of Irish people that actually went to America.
“So those American multinationals that some British people would view with envy, Irish people would have been involved in those companies.”
He said once an attractive tax structure was put in place in Ireland it attracted the US companies due to the influence of Irish Americans. The documentary also marks 1994 as the year of the first great wave of scandal to hit Catholicism in Ireland as victims of sexual abuse began to come forward.
It was also a rollercoaster year for the peace process. He had to throw out his prepared script when he went live on-air hours after the Canary Wharf bombing on his BBC chat show PK Tonight.
But the comic also recalls the excitement of Bill Clinton coming to Belfast to turn on the Christmas lights. From the distance of two generations, he believes the events of 1994 had a transformative effect on Ireland.
“That was the moment when all of these things started to be seen on an all-island basis. The idea that the movie industry would come and shoot Game of Thrones in County Down. The idea is that Fox Studios are shooting stuff now in Wicklow.
“The idea that the tourist boards north and south have come together and ‘come and see the island’. So much happened which allowed that soft unity to take place and it all goes back to 1994.”
Archive on 4: Hey World, What’s the Craic? Patrick Kielty on Ireland’s 1994 airs on BBC Radio Four on Saturday, October 12 at 8pm.
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