hello, i'm sean murray, and this is the conversation where we take an alternative look at political events and current affairs through anariesland. in this show we hope to pick, probe, investigate and uncover the stories that you want to hear. we go where mainstream won't go. this week we talk to one of ireland's finest comedians, a man that has recently taken twitter by storm, now also an author. his recent book details the horrific consequences of addiction and the redamptive process of recovery. never shall. away from

politics, he's been a strong advocate for arish unification and palestinian self-determination. tog hicky, welcome to your show, thanks man, sean, delighted to be here, delighted to have you, so tell me tag, i've recently read your book and uh, i was being mused by some of the honesty in the red in the book, and uh, actually it was, it was an amazing book, and and it's great to see, someone just put it out there like you. and particularly you're a comedian, you're not very very funny but also very very profound, that was and and and i really enjoyed it, jesus thanks for million man, thank you and and the stuff, mean your childhood grown up, of do you want to tell us a bit about that? yeah, like i'd say it was a happy childhood, you know, so and this is the funny thing about drinking, cuz alcoholism is a mental illness, and that's kind of the premise of the book, suppose, i feel like in ireland people think of drinking and drinkers and alcoholics as a kind of aber. you that

they've done something wrong morally, but the fact is that they're sick and i was sick, but i wasn't always sick, and i suppose that's the point of the childhood, there was moments where i felt, and when i say sick, i mean you need something to treat the illness, and the illness really is kind of for me anyway anxiety, uncomfortableness, i think is i might have called it, um, but i wouldn't have put the term anxiety on it, but that anxiety would have come and it would have gone, it wasn't something that was there. all the time it would kind of spike and it would spike in bizarre settings, like i remember being a kid and playing soccer with my buddies and just this kind of sense of gloom coming over myself and feeling uncomfortable in myself um of and like it was kind of working class 80s cark like i wasn't about to go home and you know call family meeting about it we didn't talk about those kind of things and as i say when when i was struck but with a bit of anxiety i probably thought i was mad there was a big fear whether it was just me or was

my community, you didn't want to be mad, you know, mad people were taken away by men in white coats and they were brought to hospital, sometimes if your drinking got totally out of hand you'd kind of wander in over the line into madness like and so and so he's gone away to some place and he's kind of locked up, that's what you didn't want, and that would have been a fear of mine from very early age cuz this anxiety, i wouldn't have called it that at the time, the feeling comes up, you're kind of going i mad, but then it would go away again and i'd enjoy doing the things i did like playing football and hanging out my mates and stuff and as i say i was a happy kid, i was obsessed with my dad, i used to kind of follow my dad around, he was good bit older, i was a real after thought in the family, i was quite young, but as i detail in the book, he was an ordinary man, but he was extraordinary to me, like he just seemed like he had life all figured out, um, whereas i felt like i was kind of caught up in myself, i was worried how i was coming across, did people like me, uh, how do i get people to like me, he just seemed to be breezing through life, not worrying about any of these things, he just seemed. have a

figured out and you also noted in the book that your savior was through acting and writing, you want to tell us a bit about that? yeah, so the the uncomfortableness that i had to go back to that again, that could, you could get rid of that loads of different ways, when i was younger playing sport, i played soccer, reasonable level and cark, i wasn't a bad soccer player, and that would often take it away, but getting involved in performing or acting... bit normally the type of acting i tried to do involved comedy and i of suppose that was the origins of the comedy thing, putting on voices, making funny noises, taking the piss out of people in my family and doing impressions of them, all that kind of stuff uh and when i was performing and mostly in school and with friends and stuff, people would laugh and that was that was another addiction straight away like, but it definitely got rid of that feeling of uncomfortableness and it gave me a sense of um that this is kind of the thing that i'm supposed to be at, and 'i was doing

the thing that i was supposed to be doing i felt and that i felt like i was enjoying it, again just that feeling of like there's something up with me, i feel uncomfortable and i can't put my finger on it, just started to dissipate." so what was the spark then that led to career in comedy? i think one of the first moments that i thought to myself i would like to do comedy was actually when i was kid and my sister and myself were very close and she was a real she had a real influential role on my taste and everything and she also had a really refined kind of sense of humor and kind of you know rick male and the young ones and all that type of kind of anarchic uh british comedy which loved so i used to try and make her laugh and i thought if she laughed at something that i had said that that was a good bar you know that i'd made my sister laugh cuz she was funny um and then it it became kind of a thing of like oh how much can i get her to laugh and like oh she didn't like this thing and it's like my first audience suppose i was also trying to make my mother laugh um and what not and then i remember going to so by

secondary school i think you know the feeling of starting secondary school is was a fat kid as well right hope i can say fat i know it's probably not the nice thing to say these days but i am saying it about myself um "and i got to school, you're fat, my hair was kind of weird, and you're just self-conscious, like you're kind of going, how i going to fit in here, my brothers, as i say, were tougher men and they probably would have went straight into the kind of like, i'll kick your head in type of thing, and i knew i didn't really hit have that in me, but i knew i had a sharp tongue and i knew it could make people laugh, and i also knew i could make people a bit scared cuuse if they mocked you and you mocked them back and you made other people laugh more, i was aware that that was a real strong currency. so um i just fell into kind of making people laugh and no one really bullied me and i kind of went to the top of the kind of social structure in school because uh i was able to look after myself with my tongue as opposed my fists you know so um that was the first inkling that i was kind of that it was good at it but then you

go on this whole journey of you know i going to be so cocky as to demand the people sit in room and listen to me because i'm so funny like that for me that's an incredibly. it's an audacious uh expression of self-confidence and self-belief. what i initially did, i did music, and i love music as well, i mean that was huge huge passion of mine. i was in a band and i would try and make some of the lyrics funny and i was kind of playing the role of a comedian within a band, so i was hiding in a band as a comedian, i think we were called exit pursued by bear, what you call exit pursued by bear, so it's it's a pretentious quote from uh from the winters tail and the whole band was very pretentious and i was the the, i suppose the the... main reason for that, but uh, but that was my way of kind of doing rock comedy or rock kind of theatrics, i suppose, um, and then later on when that folded, i was kind of doing doing bits and pieces of acting, and then an opportunity erose to start a comedy troop, so

again, it was not me on my own, it's me with two other, two other people, so that was the kind of journey, i suppose into comedy, there's a there's a a film isn't there, it's a bit like the office cuz i knew you were a fan of the office, yeah, and it's it's about. group that can and i know recky javez was actually influenced what was the name that film oh my god what's it called lads spinal spinal tap yeah this is spinal tap yeah i actually feel this is a weird thing to say but i feel like i've got a bit in common ricky draves like he was like influence of mine he was in a band he studied philosophy in college and he was like kind of doing his own thing and then kind of fell into this big massive uh comedy opportunity so always felt i'd get to a certain age, probably 40, and then these massive comedy opportunities would happen for me. hasn't happened yet on, not down south, anyway, probably get more work like in the middle east, but anyway, that's another story. well, no, speaking about the middle east and more closer to home, politics closer to home, lot of your comedy revolves

around politics and i read somewhere that you were influenced, maybe slightly in your politics by the late late show one night, you want to talk about that? yeah, "i think it was possibly 1984, i think it was, so i was kid, um, at that stage would have been probably 10, 10 or 11, and uh, just i was watching it live, i suppose like most of ireland watch later at the time, and uh, forgive me, i don't have all the all the members of the panel, but it was jorry adams was was giving an interview, and i it was a thing, we were watching it bause jorry adams was going to be on, and i, it was fairly a political house that i grew up in, you know, people probably were sympathetic to the the republican uh..." struggle, but not in any demonstrative way really, and certainly from the media that we consumed, we kind of were to believe that uh jorry adams almost personified all the problems with the north, that almost like every aspect of the conflict was on his shoulders and that he bore

personal responsibility for everything that had happened. i think it was the same night that gay burn refused to shake his hand, and he basically sat down, i didn't know that much about him before then, and uh, i didn't... know that much about the north either, and i think that's the key point that you know, when i watched that interview, i think austin curry was part of the panel, there was basically a lineup of people trying to take pops at him and... to traduce him in a variety of ways and to pin as i say the whole conflict on his shoulders and i just witnessed somebody really calmly uh without any emotion whatsoever um refue every accusation that was coming to him, but more importantly contextualized the conflict um for the first time, i'd never heard that before, i did, i hadn't heard anything about loyaless paramilitaries before, i i just thought there was one and i wasn't quite sure who they were fighting. as kid, but i just knew the ira were fighting britain, um, and that the the impression i got from the the

mainstream media down south was that, you know, ireland had won its independence, um, few countries didn't make the the great, unfortunately, and they were kicking up all this storm and violence and murder because they were prone to to murderousness, um, and we wish they would just stop it, because they're really embarrassing us now a kind of an international level, no. "i'm being a little bit playful when i say that, but that is roughly um, the sense of the north i had as kid, so i wouldn't even say that i became like an irish republican watching that interview from jerry adams, i just became somebody that was really interested in the north, and that was that was the the main uh thing for me, and because nobody had ever contextualized the conflict before, and more importantly nobody had ever stated the important role that the south had played or not played." as as whichever way you'd look it in creating the causes and conditions and

nobody had ever kind of detailed that before, for me up until that moment it was kind of separate thing, it was happening in a different place, it was unconnected to us and as i say we wish that they would just stop it, um so definitely my head blew off my shoulders, i was like okay there's more to this than the mainstream media in the south is portraying, there's much more to this story than rte. uh and the independent and the irish times are telling us cuz even i mean as a young kid i was just interested in the news and read bits and pits bits and pieces of the newspaper and stuff but uh so yeah that there was another that there was another alternative version of this history out there was new to me and did that galvinize you to explore things further just politically i mean did you read up more on on what was happening in the north or yeah i mean within a few years i suppose i would have been a shin fein uh supporter i suppose in school and that would have been unusual i think and the south in that period as well, i remember there was there was two lads in my in my class in secondary school and we were

both kind of interested in shin faine and we we went to a shint youth uh meeting and one the lads uh ken is name he had um he had a copy of on foblocked and i was reading on foblocked on my lunch break and one of my teachers took me a say the door ask me was everything all right at home um and i think you know not thing that i've come across since encapsulates the complete misunderstanding of everything in the north that was going on down south at the time and some people were doing it maliciously you know some people had agendas but most people were just eating up the propaganda and you see it today in the conflict that's going on right now in gaza most people are just ordinary people going about their business it's the people who are actually perpetrating and putting the propaganda out there they have a responsibility but average person will become influenced by the propaganda that they that they consume, so i think most people

down south just had this idea that there was just one perpetrator of violence in the north and and that jerry adams is a representative for them and so he needed to be neutralized and censored, and that's i suppose what was happening literally. you have mans in gaza there, and i'll get to that in a second, i just want to probe more about your your involvement with reunification uh, and when i say involvement, you've been a strong advocate for reunification. and why why is it important to you? i think it's important to me because it connects directly to what i was saying earlier of growing up in a state that felt like it was completely disconnected from this other state. um, as soon as i started reading, i realized that that's not the case at all, and that there's a community of people in the north that don't feel disconnected, they feel the opposite, they feel like you know, not that they they they feel irish, the... are irish and they think themselves as part of the island of ireland

and it would be their wish that that will be a 32 county republic um i think if as as you move towards breaking that sense of separation between the two and you can do it physically so you know i'm one of the few people i know in the south that goes to the north regularly and i'm not saying that in any kind of a flex it's it's an embarrassing thing to say um comedians on the scene like mario rosenstock will be a good friend of mine - i think he's amazing and he was telling me that i think he went to belfast for the first time a couple of years ago and that would be typical the man's been touring. for 20 years and he was wondering what people kind of know his stuff whatever and like the gig was sold out, i think he did he either did he either did ulster hall or somewhere massive anyway and everyone knew his stuff, everyone had been following his stuff and it's just typical of that sense of that kind of like spiritual emotional, practical disconnect i have uh be at in my work in my social life and you know making friends up

here and stuff that disconnect has never really been there for me and if the disconnect is there it makes no sense that the're two different states. um, also the history of of irish republicanism. if you're an irish republican and you're an anti-imperialist, it would feel that it's the fitting thing for the destiny of the country would be to to be reunited, and i would definitely make no apologies for that. it can sometimes be slightly controversial thing to say or slightly uncomfortable thing to say down south. and what i'm trying to do a little bit with my work is to get to the root of why anyone should be made. to feel that that's uncomfortable and i think you know something that we've spoken about a bit of bit off camera, young people are amazing cuz young people are challenging that southern perspective all the time that it's two separate states and two separate mentalities um so yeah so there they're just some of the reasons why i suppose as irish republican shocker i would want to see united ireland

you're still tuned into the conversation your weekly alternative probe of political even. and current the fers around ireland, i'm joined by our special guest, comedian and author tag hicky. moving to to events in gaza that we've been all horrified by this last few months, you've been a very strong advocate for uh palestinian self-determination, has that been, and we spoke earlier, you said you met many new friends, many new uh friends in the middle east and stuff like that, tell us a bit about that, i think i think with palestine and it's a little bit like with. united ireland as well, it comes back to something we touched on at the start of like, in my drinking, i was inauthentic, um, you have to be an authentic to to kind of survive, you have to lie, um, you have to cheat, you have to let people down in order to keep doing it, and when i got sober, one thing i was very clear about for myself was to to actually protect

myself, to stop myself from falling into possibility of drinking again and taking drugs again, which i know will ultimately lead, if i relapse, i've no doubt that i'll die, and i don't want to die, so it's it's just, it's very basic with me, i have to be authentic, so so if i have personal views about the conflict and if i have personal views about my perspective on wanting a united ireland, needless to say united ireland that would be inclusive of everyone, not a narrow nationalism, i've no interest in that, if i have those views, i need to reflect those views in my work in order to be authentic, that's the way i would... look at it, and i hope that doesn't sound too kind of, i don't, lavish or or pretentious or whatnot, but that's the way i do think, so so for instance, if i would lose some work opportunities down south for being authentic in my views, that would be a, that's absolutely fine collateral damage, i need to be authentic, so in the case of palestine, um, i have always felt that it's it's

actually one of the most bizarly, it's one of the most easy conflicts to understand, which is in direct. opposition to the key is really claim that it's too complex for you and to ever understand and it's just case, it's a land grab, it's settler colonialism, and i think if if i'm going to be authentic about ireland - i need to also be authentic about palestine and not worry too much about the backlash that you will get. also, i have friends that are doing comedy in the states and canada and places like that, they have backlash, like they have serious. "you know they have serious repercussions to worry about, in ireland it's less so, so i feel like you know many arab friends have sent me messages, i mean if you saw my messages on instagram like you be, it's it's hard not to be crying at times because there's people saying you know it's refreshing to hear someone from the west just highlight what's going on here like so it's basically like

ireland a kind of a global level for me it's like you know people hating you because the..." don't want to have the conversation and then people loving you because they see it's unusual for a white face to be fronting something that's talking about the decades of oppression, murder, mayhem, second-class citizenship, you name it aparatite that they're living under, so again if you're going to be authentic, you accept that you're going to get some some people, you had a zinus witch saying that she was putting a curse on me and all that kind of stuff, um, but then i had loads of... and friends saying that they'd done the und done the course so that was a bit of crack like you know but uh as regards work and stuff made kind of packed with myself a long time ago that i was going to be real to me anyway. "i'm not saying it's the reality, it's my reality, it's my belief system, and if that means that i don't get work with the bbc or or rt then so be it. i think you're being too kind to yourself when

you say, you don't get it hard here as an artist when you stray off the conventions, i mean like we as a contrary steped in censorship, i think still if you stray off those conventions that you do get it hard and you see that particularly from establishment journalist, um, establishment politicians, and i think you've been you've been receiv receiving. under that also yeah, suppose with journalists they'll have jobs like i don't like cuz i'm working for myself i'm lucky you know what i mean like they they'll attempt to you know so there's there's people online who tried to get my gigs cancelled and and whatnot um welcome to a club yeah yeah i suppose that's you know to be honest with you that can be tough at times because you know when that campaign was going online by this i say campaign is being kind to the guy like it seemed to just be one guy but um like i also have new baby you know and i've a partner and i have kids like i've got two kids so like it's easy for me to be like you know it's like the song you know my love and got no

money but he's got a strong beliefs it's grand for me to say that but i need to be able to provide for my family as well so it can be scary at times to think that oh okay what happens here if i actually get completely cancelled but um i don't know i'm maybe i'm just a bit of a dream or that way but i just kind of think if you just plow on and also i feel like with the stuff i'm doing i'm not being nasty either really, you know what i mean? i'm not kind of like, i'm not doing a dave chapell on it, don't get me wrong, dave is is, dave, dave chapell is a comedy god to people like me, you all his early stuff is the the chapell show is some the best satir i've ever seen in my life, and that's what makes it so sad that he went from punching up so elegantly to now just lazily punching down, um, but i feel myself and i'm always checking in with people that i respect to see i doing the right job with it, you know, before i write a sketch about palestine. for instance, i've got about two or three palestinian friends that i run it by just to make sure that the detail is there and stuff, because i don't want to become lazy or or assume that that they want this

this white lad from cork to speak for them, like you know, even at the start of oc when october 7th happened and then the the absolutely insane response that we've seen since some people said, oh you should do sketch on this or you should do sketch and that, i asked palestinians cuz i was like this might be the moment for comedy, you know i don't want to... in on something like it's hard to even think of what and you'll be able to tell me better what the irish parallel for this is you know what palestinians are going through right now i mean it feels like it's it's nachba point one or whatever like you know so was comedy even an appropriate thing to do and time and time again they'd come back and the that's i think why irish and palestinians get on so well they've got this jet black sense of humor my palestinian friends and cork were like man we need you like get in there get in there like and and also good buddy of mine and cark was going to say, you'll never have an opportunity like this again, because the other side is making such a show of itself with so-called propaganda that you've got to get in there like or it's a missed opportunity if you

don't you so yeah so tell us what's happening this year what are we going to see next in talk well i've been lucky enough to build up um nice little following from the arab world like on instagram i have just if you're interested i have much more followers in turkey uh uh and jordan than i would in ireland way more like yeah and doesn't surprise surprise me at all by the way but uh so i'd like i mean in an ideal world if i was going to do tour again i'd love to tour over there i'd love to tour in in places where uh it it's it's news to me that the that someone from the west having a kind of an anti-imperialist perspective and somebody shining light on the hypocrisy hypocrisy and atrocities of the american empire that that would be an' refreshing thing to see from their perspective, but it is, so i'd like eventually go over there and and tour there, and also for a while now, i've been trying to turn a sketch i did a couple of years ago

that caused lot of controversy, you may have seen it about loyalist in a house share in quark with the you know england, scotland, ireland and all that, i've been trying to turn that with another writer in ireland uh, michael west as his name, brilliant writer, playwrite, into a full kind of tv show stroke. film kind of effort, so but it would go above, mean they're just standing for the actual you know that there's no depth to any of those characters like it's just you know scotland is just a crazy wig and kind of a scotland jersey um but i've built them up we've built them up into full dimensional characters, hope it could be tv show uh and i'm talking to to people of significance who are interested in it should we say so i would love to see um some sort of brexit but it's a house sharing cark uh developed into a tv show or a film, tog looking forward to that and it's always good to see in belfast say be safe to consider your second home now oh man well definitely west b fast anyway well

listen thank you for coming always good to see you, pleasure brother. and that does it for another week. we'd love for you to join the conversation by sharing the link to today's program to help us grow our audience across all our social media platforms. i like to thank our special guest tog hicky. in the meantime, the conversation will be back next week with more investigations and analysis. i'm sean murray. bye for now. in this week's show we'll be highlighting how zius weaponization of anti-semitism is beginning to spectacularly backfire. in november last year, one prominent zienist zelot made a prepostous accusation of antisemitism about a student's mascot on the university's chinese tv quiz show, but she was left with a copious quantity of egg on her face after legal action was taken by the student who was targeted. he came up the rod

strom and he turned around. said um, can people stop hissing behind my back? we all looked at each other, what's your point? no one's hissing, certainly we couldn't hear any hissing from where we were sitting, and then the the uh chair of the meeting shut the meeting down and somehow um this hissing that i couldn't hear was interpreted as anti-semitic, give them pictures of octopus like this lovely hanik octopus oscar here, yes um and say actually this was used by the nazis and before any any representative. of a blue octopus must be antisemitic, except of course the ones which are not antisemitic.

the headlines and press tv, officials expressed great concern about and slam the iof attack on gaza's elsafa hospital, which has claimed dozens of palestinin lives. the eu top official complains of famin being used as a weapon of war by israel to kill the people in gaza. fresh from his election when russia's president vladimir putin warns of world war ii and case of western military deployment to ukraine. for your this conflict between russia and nato will be just one.