COMEDIAN KEVIN MCGAHERN ON HIS NEW ROLE AS BILLY, A KID IN CAVAN WHO THOUGHT HE WAS A COWBOY
Kevin McGahern dons a Stetson to play a troubled young man (who thinks he’s a cowboy!) ...in a role that’s VERY close to home.
Rural Ireland is full of eccentric characters says ex-Republic Of Telly presenter Kevin McGahern, who knows of a man who used to dress up in his sister’s clothes – but only during a full moon. ‘This was 30 years ago, so long before Panti Bliss made it very fashionable,’ he says. ‘Every full moon, without fail, not as a gag or anything, this guy was just compelled to wear his sister’s clothes. And he would come into the town and most people were actually very respectful of him. They were like: “Oh that’s just Jimmy – that’s what he does.”’
McGahern is delving into the psychology of his own inner eccentric in the new independent Irish film No Party For Billy Burns, written and directed by Padraig Conaty. The Loch Gowna native plays Billy, a simple young man who imagines himself as a cowboy as he roams the fields of Cavan. He lives with his grandfather (played by Shane Connaughton, who co-wrote the screenplay for My Left Foot) who he believes was once a famous gunslinger.
Coming from a troubled background, Billy gets taken under the wing of local guard Sergeant Jack Cooper (Ray Reilly) and has hopes of one day becoming his deputy. But then Billy comes home to find his grandfather dead on the floor and the lines between reality and cowboy fantasy become blurred. Billy gets into a row over his love for Laura (Sonya O’Donoghue), the girlfriend of local troublemaker Ciaran (Charlie McGuinness) and events get further and further out of hand.
‘It’s sort of a tragic comedy. It’s everything that annoyed us – the things that we loved and hated about growing up in the country,’ McGahern says.
The darker sides of the film were partly inspired by the events of the controversial siege of Abbeylara, Co. Longford, in April 2000. The bizarre episode began with John Carthy, a mentally ill young man who barricaded himself in his house with a shotgun for two days. The Garda Emergency Response Unit was called in and shot Carthy dead after he exited his house carrying the gun.
‘A lot of the locals were quite bitter about it because they felt if the cops were allowed to go in and talk to him one on one, then the whole thing would have been resolved. There were elements of that which inspired us as well. It showed what happens when a town ignores a problem,’ says McGahern.
He says similar themes in Patrick McCabe’s novel Butcher Boy and Shane Connaughton’s The Run Of The Country also heavily influenced the film. ‘It’s just that element of joy and camaraderie you get from hanging out with a group of men – an army of men. If you don’t play football, you’re left out to the side and you need to form a gang in order to survive,’ McGahern says. Ciaran is an amalgam of people McGahern and Conaty encountered in their youth: ‘Ciaran was inspired by a couple of dudes, who we were just fascinated by. These guys were proper born leaders of men. And they were really intelligent dudes who were really great at machines, getting away from guards, driving through checkpoints and were kind of outlaws. In another time, they would’ve been generals but they find themselves in a time where their skills are going to waste. And the frustration of that leads to bar fights and run-ins with guards. They’re guys looking for an antagonist or a rival,’ says McGahern. His home county has been an influence on a lot of his work, with the issues that young men face in rural Ireland appearing again and again.
‘Cavan is a special place. Padraig and I both grew up with this dichotomy towards Cavan. On the one hand we were obsessed with it and loved it. But at the same time we felt it crippled us. Everything that was good about it was also kind of bad. We had a wonderful childhood. We were left to our own devices and would go fishing and roam the countryside. ‘I remember moving up to Dublin to go to college – you get the p*** taken out of you for being a culchie but we felt sorry for the Dubs because what do you have in Dublin? You have Dr Quirkey’s and concrete.
‘But at the same time the country can be lonely and it can be tough growing up there. So it’s that kind of love/hate relationship,’ he says.
Young men in rural Ireland are also at the heart of McGahern’s work in Hardy Bucks. The show is set in the fictional Castletown but the real-life shooting location is small-town Swinford, Co. Mayo.
‘When we were filming down in Swinford, it’s like there’s two Swinfords – the Old Ireland Swinford, which are these lovely old men who drink glasses of Guinness and have eyebrows on their cheeks and are the nicest men in the world.
‘And then there’s a nastier younger element that is very frustrated and a little bit violent as well. So you’ve got two worlds existing in the same town. And Hardy Bucks is a sillier, less threatening version of that,’ says McGahern.
‘The humour growing up was fantastic but it was also mixed into a lot of tragedy. It’s probably not easy being a young man growing up in the countryside 30 years ago – there’s a lot of loneliness and depression. It seems like there’s eight men for every woman so it’s almost like mainland China. There’s a lot of young lads feeling very frustrated and they don’t know how to let that out. Usually, alcohol is the only solution,’ he says. Frustrated young men also feature in his 2016 documentary series for RTÉ, Kevin McGahern’s America. The three-part series was filmed when the US presidential race was in full swing.
So what is he working on now – and will there be a second Hardy Bucks movie any time soon?
‘I don’t know… there was talk of it. We’ve a new season coming out in autumn that we shot two months ago. I wasn’t involved with the last film. I prefer the TV show because I feel like there’s more room to play around with it. Pretty much the same cast will be on, apart from a special celebrity guest that we’re fairly excited about for the last episode – but I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say that,’ he says, with the air of a man who has perhaps let the cat out of the bag.
But what Kevin is probably most famous for is hosting Republic Of Telly, which went off the air in
‘This man would put on his sister’s dress – but only during a full moon’
February. He says he wasn’t too disappointed when it was cancelled, because it freed him up to take on other projects.
‘I just felt like we could do another three years of this and you’re kind of in the same position as you were. I felt it was a kind of “s*** or get off the pot” moment,’ he says. Surprisingly, one of his own favourite television presenters is the late broadcaster Derek Davis. He talks about ‘hanging out’ with him as a child. ‘I grew up watching him on Live At Three. I remember thinking: “Who is this lad just taking the p***?” Because he seemed to have that Terry-Wogan thing, where you were presenting the show but you were also kind of ridiculing it at the same time, which I really liked,’ he says.
Did he ever get in trouble doing his own share of taking the p*** on live TV? ‘Occasionally you’ll run into somebody and they’re not that happy to see you but you just sort of take that as it is. I’ve never been one for celebrity parties, so I didn’t really mind if certain celebs weren’t that happy,’ he says.
‘The majority of people took it very well. I think you have to. The worst thing you can be seen as in this country is s **** craic. And if you’re seen moaning for having the p*** taken out of you, you’re labelled as s **** craic... nobody wants that label at all. Everyone wants to look like they can take a joke, so we had that on our side.’ Besides a new season of Hardy
Bucks, McGahern is also working on a new comedy. ‘Myself, Ed Salmon, and Diarmuid O’Brien are writing a sitcom about the Irish country music scene. We don’t really know where we’re going to go with it. It’s about two guys who are coming out of retirement to cash in on the whole boom of it.
‘The Irish country music scene is just exploding and I have no idea why. It’s a weird hybrid. I really like American country like Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings. But the Irish scene is a weird hybrid of trad and trad-American,’ he says.
‘We’re going to try and write as much as we can and then pitch it, just so it’s as fully developed as possible in our head. We’ll get the film out of the way and then focus a bit more about that,’ he says.
But at the end of August, Kevin has a very special day coming up. ‘Yeah, my first marriage,’ he laughs. I wonder what his fiancée Siobhán Cassidy will think of that? ‘I just say that to annoy her when she reads it. Yeah, big day, so we’re all very excited and getting our ducks in a row before that. ‘But we’re both fairly relaxed. I don’t think we have to worry about any Bridezillas or Groomzillas. We’re a pretty chilled couple and I don’t think we’re going to pull our hair out. So what was the stag like? ‘I had an army of men that I was very proud to assemble. It was good fun, there were lads bullwhipping Garda cars and we went out to a gun range the next day to shoot clay and targets, which was the best hangover cure – I highly recommend it. ‘It sounds horrible – the idea of gunpowder going off right behind your ear – but you concentrate on the task and it gives you a good burst of adrenaline,’ he adds. Better than a Sunday fry, that is the true cowboy’s hangover cure.
No Party For Billy Burns premiered at the Galway Film Fleadh on Thursday.
‘The humour when I was growing up was fantastic but it was mixed with tragedy’