Eleanor Tiernan was a very good child. So much so that “goodness” was her defining characteristic. She was a worrier and felt a great deal of responsibility. It is, she ventures, linked to being an eldest girl. As she got older, self-doubt lingered and she was hard on herself. This anxiety led the comedian to start cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) several years ago. After a while, she came to realise that it wasn’t all her fault. This mantra, employed with glib reference to that famous Good Will Hunting scene, was what she had an audience shout at her during a televised performance last St Patrick’s Day.
Similar to a technique her therapist had used, Tiernan asked the spectators to imagine that there was a seven-year-old Ireland in the room. As Tiernan listed out all the bad things that would happen to it, the audience bellowed the same response.
“That we have to eat every scrap of food on our plates because we’re only six generations away from a famine.”
“It’s not your fault!”
“The English swiping the Six Counties off us.”
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“It’s not your fault!”
“Roy Keane leaving the Irish team in Saipan.”
“It’s not your fault!”
For her latest show Tiernan is revisiting this idea. She has set up the National Therapy Project, a “citizen improvement scheme being conducted by the National Identity Management Agency (NIMA)”. Faux-government leaflets have been distributed, explaining what the National Therapy Project is, why we need it, and informing citizens that “attendance is compulsory on a voluntary basis”. There are three images within the flyer: a blighted potato, Margaret Thatcher and Roy Keane. “He’s like our Cú Chulainn,” says Tiernan, observing the image thoughtfully. It’s funny, but it’s no joke. Tiernan has stopped the Tiger Dublin Fringe from advertising the National Therapy Project as “comedy” — this is a social experiment. “Sometimes when people book comedy, they think it’s a trivial thing. I don’t think this is trivial,” she says. “I want people to have that doubt and think,
‘Is this being organised by the government?’ Who’s to say the government are the government, even.
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We could think about Ireland in more mythical terms and say our need for this supersedes the government. They should be doing this kind of thing, but they’re not, so let’s just do it ourselves.
“It seems to me that Irish people always come together to process joy. When there’s a happy event we tend to be in the same room, like when Katie Taylor wins, but there’s no forum to process a trauma. I’m inventing this therapy process based on my own experiences of therapy and the comedic sense of bringing people together and talking about things.”
Tiernan still sees her therapist. “I’d be very self-critical. It really can suck the life out of comedy if you’re taking it that harshly,” she says. “[CBT] helped me not to take things so personally, and just be in the moment a bit more.” The comedian wants to take the National Therapy Project around the country. She’d love to be up in the Phoenix Park, a modern incarnation of the Pope’s cathartic visit in 1979. However, Tiernan is not saying she can help people with serious personal problems; the National Therapy Project is about addressing the collective traumas. “People go to comedy and theatre as consumers, but I want them to come as citizens. Because this is their duty, they’re part of a tribe. In the way that you would go and do your NCT — that’s the persona I wanted to bring to this project,” she says. “It’s not a performance for me. I feel like it’s a task, a thing I have to do, rather than it being about whether people like me or not at the end of it. That’s hugely liberating, not to have to worry about that.”
Born in 1976 and raised in Athlone, Tiernan appeared on the comedy scene in 2007. She had trained and worked as a civil engineer but took a career break to explore
stand-up. She wrote a play with her cousin Tommy, already an established comedian, and they performed it in Edinburgh and Dublin. Her lineage attracts a lot more attention in the UK than at home. “Everybody in Ireland is related to one another anyway,” she says. “It’s not such a huge deal.”
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The comedian left engineering behind for good in 2010. She has been writing skits for RTE’s Irish Pictorial Weekly, a gig that came along just as she was running out of creative inspiration for stand-up. However, it has challenges. “Ireland is a hard country to do satire in because people are quite politically engaged,” she says. “As a satirist on the television, you have to do something better than what people at home are capable of coming up with on their own. You have to take things very far.”
Tiernan is conscious of Ireland’s tendency to consider itself too deeply. She is just back from this year’s Edinburgh Festival where her show, Help the Frigid, included a joke deriding the audience at Chris Brown’s 2012 gig in Ireland. They booed the rapper when he mistakenly declared himself to be in the UK. “That’s the part of Chris Brown they didn’t accept? That he didn’t know where Dublin was?”
“I have no desire to go into the realm of patting ourselves on the back, saying, ‘Isn’t it great?’” she explains. “I get really turned off by that kind of thoughtless patriotism. Nationality is a backbone in a lot of comedy, being Irish. I often try to resist depending on that too much.”
Tiernan is uncomfortable with how a lowest-common-denominator approach is regularly employed in comedy clubs. There is a joke she could do about arriving at Dublin airport after your holidays: sunburnt, sweating and having to return to work the next day. “But then they make you walk past people who are just about to go on their holidays, And I’d say, ‘Only in Ireland could that happen.’ And people would go, ‘Yeah!’ But it happens in every airport. It’s just very easy to hang a joke on Irishness.”
On the front of the National Therapy Project leaflet there is a photograph of Tiernan standing beside the Famine memorial on Dublin’s Custom House Quay. She has a tricolour feather boa around her neck, several cans in her arms and a fag placed between her lipstick-smeared lips. A photographic reminder that we all partied, or the comedian after a night out? “I don’t do that, smoking and drinking, any more,” she says. “It’s how I might have looked, yeah definitely. I stopped a few years ago. The thing with comedy is you’re in pubs so much that it’s just very easy for it to become every night.” Drink became a depressant and it was easier to stop completely than to constantly monitor it. She gave up the fags soon after.
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“With both I had to get to a point where I was totally fed up with myself and just didn’t believe myself any more when I said I was going to stop. I was just like, ‘Ugh.’ If you’re drinking most nights and then you get up the next morning and you’re like, ‘Right I’m definitely not drinking tonight,’ everyone says that, and then later on you’re like, ‘Weh!’” she exclaims, pretending to scoop up a pint. The comedian isn’t saying “never again”, but alcohol doesn’t complement her attempts to write jokes. “It doesn’t suit the lifestyle, and I see myself having that lifestyle for quite a while,” she says. If comedy does ever become tiresome, Tiernan would consider therapy as a follow-up career. With the National Therapy Project, she refuses to define it too neatly. “People say, ‘Is it healing, or is it comedy?’ I don’t think you have to choose between the two. Comedy is healing in and of itself.”
National Therapy Project runs at Liberty Hall as part of the Tiger Dublin Fringe on Sept 16-20 ; fringefest.com