Patrick Kielty on Northern Ireland, Brexit and Billy Connolly

“Growing up here I used to think, ‘God, why can’t we be more like the rest of the world?’ he begins. “And with recent events I’m now kind of thinking, ‘Maybe we’ve got a story to tell that’s actually a good one, that people should have a wee think about.”

What is that story? Well, it’s one about how a place synonymous with violence managed to make and maintain a peace. It’s a story that in these post-Trumpian, post-Brexit times when everyone is shouting at full volume offers a notion that Northern Ireland can offer a vision of quiet reasonableness.

Yes, I know, I know. This is Northern Ireland we are talking about here. The place where they were throwing petrol bombs about this week. And yet here we are. Let’s give it a whirl anyway.

Patrick Kielty is in Belfast when we speak. He’s on tour around Ireland with his new stand-up show Borderline, his first since 2015. It is mid-morning on March 18. Not especially late, but he apologises anyway. “I’m sorry it couldn’t be earlier but when you’re called Paddy, and it was Paddy’s Day yesterday, you have it in your contract that nothing happens before half nine, so …” he begins.

Did you have a late night, Patrick? Not really, he says.

“I was working in the Lyric theatre. We’ve been in there since Tuesday. We’re doing eight shows over five nights. The torture of seeing a room full of Irish people who have been on the sauce from earlier on in the day and you’re the only sober one in the room …

“I didn’t get off last night until half ten and by the time I got home last night I raised a couple. But it was very pedestrian, Teddy, in relation to years gone by.”

Age comes to all of us in the end. And these days Patrick Kielty is 51 years old (not that he looks it), a father of two young kids with his wife Cat Deeley and maybe not quite the hellraiser he may once have been. Even on St Patrick’s Day. That’s fatherhood for you.

“We’ve got one who’s six and one who’s four. This is the first stand-up tour I’ve done since they were born. And you think to yourself in your head you’re going to get back into that comedian time-frame of going out, working later, staying up later, waking up later.

“But you don’t wake up later. The body clock is still ticking at 6.30am, quarter to seven. The idea of having a few pints after the show … It puts the brakes on that a wee bit.”

Cat Deeley and Patrick Kielty

Kielty will be bringing Borderline to Scotland later this year. And, yes, as the title might suggest, it’s about the country he came from, what it’s gone through and where it is now.

Ask him for a 30-second pitch and he gives you a minute.

“The show is a personal show about me growing up in a little village in Northern Ireland which I thought was heaven. Finding out a little bit later in life that it wasn’t heaven and that we were living through the Troubles and how that came to visit my door and my dad dying.

“Then the idea of even though something terrible happened you can fix it. And the story of how we actually made peace here.”

There is a lot to unpack in that answer. But just to begin with, Kielty may be best known these days as a sometime presenter of The One Show or being a pinch-hitter stand-in on Radio 2, but it is worth remembering that he cut his teeth as a comedian telling jokes about the IRA and Ian Paisley on a Belfast stage when the Troubles were still at their height, which frankly took some cojones.

And in recent years he has made two thoughtful documentaries about his homeland. In My Dad, The Peace Deal and Me in 2018 he even talked about “his dad dying.” In fact, his father Jack was murdered by loyalist paramilitaries in 1988, one of the thousands killed during the Troubles.

Meanwhile, in last year’s One Hundred Years of Union he returned to Northern Ireland on its centenary to look at its history and its future in these post-Brexit times.

It’s fair to say that he has the odd thing or two to say about Northern Ireland, its past and future.

But do we want to hear it, though? There’s a Stormont election coming up in a couple of weeks in Northern Ireland. It’s possible that you hadn’t noticed what with Partygate and Ukraine and everything else. But then there has hardly been blanket coverage from the media. (Now if it was an American election, things would probably be different, but it’s only the bit on the top left of the map of the UK, so who cares, right?)

And yet it’s possible that after May 5 Sinn Fein will emerge as the largest party. There are questions to be asked about where the DUP are right now under a new leader and having raised merry hell over the Northern Ireland Protocol. The future of Brexit could well be decided in Belfast harbour.

So maybe it does matter. But then I’m from Northern Ireland too, so I’m biased. Both Kielty and I were among the many who left Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Because, well, why wouldn’t you?

“Previously, I thought that my job was to mentally leave somewhere that was bats*** crazy and to try to integrate into normal life with normal people somewhere else,” Kielty says now, recalling his younger self.

Over the years he has lived in London and in Los Angeles, pursuing a career as a comedian and as a broadcaster. But in recent years, in the wake of Trump and Brexit, he has found himself looking back and reassessing what we all went through in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. It wasn’t the people but the times that were crazy, he now thinks.

And, he adds, “maybe the people we thought were completely sane and we wanted to be more like … Maybe they are a wee bit crazier than we thought.”

The British Army in Belfast in 1972

And right now, with the world in a state, it’s possible that the example of the people of Northern Ireland is a positive one, he suggests. “The fact that they actually went through this huge process to make peace is kind of a superpower,” he suggests.

This seems a recent development in his thinking. In 2018 Kielty took to Twitter to school Boris Johnson on Northern Ireland and the impact of Brexit. “Your Brexit lies have opened a Pandora’s box for Northern Ireland. It’s one reason why the majority of people in NI voted to remain in the EU (almost as if they knew more about the fragile equilibrium of their politics than you),” he tweeted.

A year later he warned that a Hard Brexit could lead to a united Ireland.

But today Kielty sounds, well, almost hopeful. “What I’ve found is it goes in waves,” he admits, thinking back to the Brexit vote. “Whenever all that upheaval was coming, and you knew the place that you were from was going to bear brunt of what was going to happen, you get very pessimistic.

“I went back and made a documentary last year and my headset was really pessimistic going into that. And now I feel much more optimistic.

“I still feel frustrated and angry that stuff is going on that people can’t control and it is affecting their lives,” he admits. But it’s the resilience of the people that is reason to be hopeful. That, “and the idea of we’ve lived through a lot worse than this,” he says.

“I think Northern Ireland is a classic example of people who are actually making progress and politicians that aren’t,” he suggests. “And I think if you look at what’s going on in the rest of the UK and indeed the rest of the world, it’s a similar story.

“I think that Northern Ireland has become less polarised. We used to live in this binary prism here. There’s the classic joke about the Jewish guy who gets lost in Belfast. ‘Are you a Catholic Jew or are you a Protestant Jew?’

“We actually made all the progress that we made here by giving a little bit of ground.

“So, to come from Northern Ireland where you see the middle ground working and then having lived in America and you see Trump and Brexit and all these things that are essentially polarising the rest of the world, you’re kind of going. ‘Guys, guys, we went through that thing of “it’s black or white” and it didn’t work. There’s a bit in the middle that we found. Maybe you should have a think about it.’”

And perhaps the evidence for his argument is all around him as we speak. Belfast is a very different place to the one I used to visit in the 1980s when there were barriers all around the city centre or the one he started his stand-up career in at the start of the 1990s when the Troubles seemed interminable.

“It’s a completely different city,” he agrees. “Tourism, hotels. Belfast has become a destination, the whole Game of Thrones thing.

“And that’s what I’m saying. This is a society that has been transformed by realising that it’s not black or white.”

We haven’t talked much about comedy, have we? Patrick, I tell him, as I’m in Scotland I’m contractually obliged to ask you about Billy Connolly.

I can almost hear him smile down the phone. “Yeah, whenever I was growing up my dad was a builder. The language in our house would have been fairly colourful. Nobody was getting pulled up for the odd swear word in our house.”

He tells me about his memory of sitting in the car as a 14-year-old “with my dad listening to Billy Connolly tapes and Billy going at it full tilt. The tears running down my da’s cheeks and the tears running down my cheeks. He was in his early forties by that stage, and I was only a teenager.”

That’s a vision of a boy and his dad two years before the worst thing that could happen happened.

“I got to meet him,” Kielty says of Connolly. “We did a special on The One Show and he walked in, and I became 14 again. I am never starstruck. I met Muhammad Ali and I met Neil Armstrong and Nelson Mandela. But I was jelly whenever I met Billy Connolly.”

Kielty's comedy hero Billy Connolly

What, I wonder, did it take for Kielty to get on the stage for the first time?

“A keg of beer. I didn’t really plan to have a comedy career. I ended up going to Queen’s University [in Belfast]. There was a Freshers’ talent competition. A few of the lads who were in my house with me had heard me do a few impressions and they wanted me to go and win the beer. And so, I went up that night and the competition mustn’t have been great because I ended up winning the beer. And if that hadn’t had happened, I probably wouldn’t have ended up doing what I was doing.”

Soon he helped set up a comedy club in Belfast city centre. People were still being killed and he got up on stage and started telling jokes about what was happening.

“We opened the Empire comedy club back in 1992 and things were still pretty bad. Because I had to compere, I needed to write material every week. So, you’d open the newspapers to try to see what was going on in the news.

“And I just assumed that the front of the Sun and the front of the Daily Mirror in Belfast was the same as the front of the Sun and the front of the Daily Mirror in London. I kind of thought everyone was getting Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley on the front page.

“And it was only when you go over to the Comedy Store [you realise] ‘Oh, right, OK, that’s not news here.’

“I think, looking back, there was an appetite to reflect what was going on in people’s lives. I think that was important.”

It still is, he says. “I think for me as a stand up – and maybe a lot of stand ups think the same – if you’ve got nothing to say about your life and what’s going on at the moment in the world or your world, you don’t get on stage.”

Patrick Kielty, be in no doubt, has something to say.

Patrick Kielty will perform Borderline at The Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, on June 1, Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, June 2, The Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, June 3 and Tramway, Glasgow, June 4 For tickets visit mickperrin.com

Patrick Kielty, Film Star

“I’ve got a movie coming out which was just absolutely leftfield. The movie’s called Ballywalter and the amazing Irish actor Seana Kerslake and myself are in the two lead roles.

“It was all very weird to go from standing on a stage with a quarter of an inch of microphone cable in front of 5[comma?]000 people saying ‘Here’s what I think is funny. What do you think?’ Most people think that’s terrifying.

“For me to walk on set, having not done any screen acting before, and have all the lights and the crew and people looking at you, that’s probably the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done.”