Tommy Tiernan

Tommy Tiernan describes his new series as “a ramble through the Irish imagination in all its awkward contradictions”. Rambling Tommy Tiernan's Epic West ...

And the toxicity of Irish small-town life is in no way confined to the west – or even to small towns. Epic West is a love letter to a place that looms large in Ireland’s sense of self. Tiernan’s vision of the west as a realm unto itself – Irishness on steroids – is of course not original. And it does stray slightly into self-parody when, paraphrasing his late friend, the writer John Moriarty, he describes the Owenmore river as carving a “sensuous” path through the landscape. The first of two episodes unspools as a garrulous tribute to the west, here defined as stretching from Kerry to Donegal. Tommy Tiernan describes his new series as “a ramble through the Irish imagination in all its awkward contradictions”.