[Tommy Tiernan]

Quite literally gagging for it.

Tommy Tiernan spoke to John Murray on RTÉ Radio One this morning during which the following exchange occurred…

John Murray: “Because you travel around the country and you take in what’s happening, are we a little but more at ease with ourselves, have we got over that patch where we thought, you know, everything…”

Tommy Tiernan: “No, I think there’s something. I sense, generally speaking, that we are, we’re still soft, vulnerable, mad, depressed, wild, hopeless, miserable, lovely people. And there’s something about us though that is subservient. I think we do have, and [writer] Pat McCabe reminded me of this great phrase: ‘We have backs that are aching for the lash’. And I think that we put up with the things that, we’re so genetically, historically, we’re so used to putting up with bad management and mistreatment that we kinda, there’s something in us that thinks we deserve it. And the way the banks are treating people now. Your man, what’s the Bank of Ireland lad, Richie..”

Murray: “Richie Boucher?”

Tiernan: “Yeah, Dick the Butcher. The banks, you know. We see drawings and we hear stories about three of four hundred years ago, two hundred years ago, people being ousted out of houses by landlords and having to pay exorbitant rents and we ran from the English into the arms of the church and we ran from the church into the arms of the banks. And the banks are the new landlords now. The system is exactly the same – we’re paying exorbitant amounts of money to stay in our own houses. And I think people like Dick the Butcher,if we were, if we had more, if we weren’t so bent over, do you know? If we were a bit more, a bit more…maybe it just takes a generation, maybe it takes three or four generations for people to learn how to stand upright and to feel entitled to stand upright.”

Murray: “So we’re cowed by it all?”

Tiernan: “I think we’re a little bit defeated, you know, and I think. A friend of mine, Gerry Mallon, a comedian from Galway, had this great line that we just don’t have the weather for revolutions.”

Mmmf.

Listen back in full here

Michael Chester/Photocall Ireland