IRISH comedian Tommy Tiernan has revealed he was touched inappropriately by a school teacher and another man in separate incidents as a teen.
The Derry Girls star, 49, also recalled his naivety at the time because "in the 1980s in Ireland, you didn't get too much education on how to deal with perverts".
He told the Sunday Independent's Life magazine: "Because I was never sexually abused as a child, it didn't trigger any memory or something that happened when I was younger.
"But bloody sure he [the teacher] touched me. He was so camp, and he had a lisp as well.
"He'd be grabbing and squeezing you, but you couldn’t challenge his authority. But maybe he thought, 'This weak, genial young man will tolerate it'. I was 16".
Lucky escape
The Navan-raised funnyman also revealed he had a lucky escape later the same year after a similarly horrific experience while hitchhiking home from Dublin.
He recalled: "This guy picked me up in a car in Dublin and he said, 'I’m Spanish' — he was putting on this accent.
"He was asking me the English words for various body parts. I told him the words for boobs and all that, and then he pointed to his crotch and he said, 'What is the word for this?'
"I felt shy. And then he put his hand on my knee. And I said, 'Pull the car over, I’ll get out here'".
Tiernan added that he was "proud" of himself for "having the wherewithal to stop him doing it to me", but "was mainly annoyed that I still had to get a lift to Navan".
He further told of how the man involved may have tried to lure other young men the same way, explaining: "I was telling the story of this at a party about six months later, and a guy listening said that the same thing happened to him."
The new series of The Tommy Tiernan Show begins on RTÉ One at 9.30pm on Saturday, May 4.
