WRITER, actress and comedian Tara Flynn is a bona fide expert in Irish ways.
Observing Irish women’s response to whatever life throws at them in her first book You’re Grand: The Irishwoman’s Secret Guide to Life, she’s followed it up with a new release Giving Out Yards: The Art of Complaint, Irish Style. As the title suggests it takes a wry look at Irish habits of having a good aul rant, our favourite national pastime.
Born in Cork and living in Dublin, media personality Tara has parodied society plenty — from her not-so-inspirational
@flynnspirations Twitter account to her YouTube videos.
But she’s not without her serious side, being one of the first high-profile women in Ireland to come forward with their personal story in order to fight abortion laws. At Electric Picnic this year, she frankly discussed her experience of travelling to Holland for an abortion, prompting a new wave of activism. And she doesn’t shy away from the subject in Giving Out Yards either — instead she pokes fun at Ireland’s idiosyncrasy on the topic.
We find how her campaigning came about, why she picked moaning as a subject matter.
What made you decide to write about complaining?
There’s an inevitability to our misery, so we go ‘ah no, I’m grand’ because we didn’t expect any more — and that’s what the first book is about. But I thought, what about the flipside to that, which is when we’re not grand. Part of the process is to give out about it: we give out on the radio, we go out online, in blog form, so I had a little look at all of them through different characters.
Read Tara Flynn's Six Golden Rules for a Good Emigration Song here
Do you have any favourite characters?
I have two: Mairead, because she loves the sound of her own voice so she never stops. I could write her for days. She loves giving out, she lives for it. Ciaran the Keyboard Warrior does too — he’s more succinct but he has more vitriol. We’ve all met him. He’s the troll online.
Is there any of you in them?
I put a bit of myself in all of them, but they’re not any one person. They’re an amalgam of people, the types we often hear on Irish talk radio, or they write to the press. Dee’s politics is closest to my own, but I tried to see what would be annoying about those stances as well.
Is moaning just an Irish thing?
A lot of the things we complain about are universal. But we’ve experienced the ‘shushening’ — which is oppression by another country or religion. You then think, ‘we’ve been shushened before and we’ll be shushened no longer’.
Then what makes it different is the public nature of it. There’s not a talk show in the land who’s had a problem getting listeners in. But that makes us inert — we don’t take to the streets too easily. But we’ve started to.
The obvious movement right now is abortion — how did your family feel about you coming forward with your story?
They were apprehensive but they knew about it and they knew it was time to start speaking about it. We need to talk about it and acknowledge that 12 people a day travel, and those who can’t for visa, financial or disability reasons are DIY-ing it and that’s extremely dangerous.
People have spoken about it before, but either anonymously or without platform. I don’t have a massive platform but it was enough that it got people starting to talk, and by sheer coincidence Roisin Ingle spoke out too, and then the March for Choice happened, and then Graham and Helen Linehan spoke out.
How close are we to legalising abortion?
I’ve no idea. Repealing the eighth amendment should have been the logical step once the women from Termination for Medical Reasons started speaking out. But if their stories weren’t enough to move politicians into action, it’s going to have to be numbers. Hopefully it will be sooner rather than later — in the next couple of years perhaps.
How do you deal with negative reactions from telling your story?
The person who invented the mute button on Twitter deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. I’ve had so much abuse — I’ve been called a murderer and that would be the worst of it, if I thought it was true. Usually Twitter trolls aren’t open to dialogue, they just want to have a rant, at your face. But I don’t have to justify my opinion. I’ve chosen to share my story for a good reason, but it’s my private business and I don’t have to explain it to anyone.
Did you have any qualms in discussing the topic in a humour book?
It’s a funny book but I also tackle serious subjects. It’s very loosely A-Z, so it goes from Aborshhh...: Don’t Say the A-word to Let Zygotes Be Zygotes. There’s nothing funny about abortion, but I try to get jokes around the silence around the situation. Twelve invisible women take the magic boat every day! Take that Harry Potter — you don’t need a cloak in Ireland. I satirise the silence, not the procedure and not crisis pregnancies. It’s not funny to me at all, I’ve experienced it.
How did your father’s death in March 2015 affect the book?
It possibly affected the content in the earlier drafts, but I was able to excise the parts when I heard grief talking.
His death was expected, but it still doesn’t stop the floor from opening up beneath you. It was difficult to be creative. Luckily the publishers, Hachette, knew I’d find my way back but there were a few weeks where I did miss a deadline. Grief has very funny ways of manifesting itself, and for me I couldn’t even read source material. I thought if I can’t write, I’d at least research. But my brain went ‘no! I’m going away for a while’. It did come back and then it became part of the healing process, because it’s a positive fun thing to do.
How are you feeling now?
I’m getting there. I know what grief is and I’ve seen other people go through it, but living it is another thing again. Hopefully it will get better and I’ll concentrate on the happy memories.
Are there any plans to turn the book into a TV show?
There’s been some interest but nothing’s concrete. You never know — the two books are flip sides of each other: things can get miserable, but once we’ve vented we can see things positively. So it might be nice to make one show out of them.
