Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Belfast has been wonderful to me..
Noel will bring love and hope to SSE Arena gig
upervet Noel Fitzpatrick hits Belfast on Sunday and says he is bringing love in abundance.
The Co Laois man has a following he never expected before his appearance on Channel 4 as a world-class neuro-orthopaedic surgeon, miles away from his childhood on his family’s farm in Ballyfin.
His show, Welcome To My World, is expected to attract thousands at the SSE Arena and he says every member of the audience will be an important cog in the machine he hopes is changing the world for the better.
He added: “Belfast has always been wonderful to me. The secret to happiness here and everywhere is that people connect to things that are really important in their life – love and hope are two of those things – they are both very important.
“I was going to call this the love and hope tour.
“When I say Welcome To My World, its really about the ins and outs of life, no matter what age you are.
“I love to see the light in the eyes of the kids when they see what we do – I just love that.
“Older people are the very same. Just recently an 85-year-old man came up to me after the show and said he’d waited all his life for this. I was wondering what he meant but then he said he’d waited all his life for somebody to explain how love and medicine actually work together and should continue to do so even more as we go into the future.
“I’m a messenger really. I’m just some bloke who’s trying to do his best but the message is really, really important and I think we’re all torn apart by prejudice and other bad things going on.
“But dogs don’t care, cats don’t care, they don’t care what your colour is, your religion, your sexuality, they’d probably prefer if you smell.
“They don’t judge you and I think people really react to that unconditional love and loyalty.
“As a young boy I was bullied and had a difficult time at school so at the show the beginning is about anchoring this stuff that’s quite painful.
“Remarkably this show is not so much about animals as it is about the essence of why we are in fact human and it’s about anyone who ever had a big dream.
“When I was a kid I had a pretty hard time at school and I invented a superhero called Vet Man who would save me from the bullies.
“We’d go around together making the animals better. So the show is about looking at those big dreams and looking at all the bullies, whether they’re in the playground, in the workplace, school, or on social media. I call them the men with no name because they don’t deserve a name. nd I try and explain to people it’s your choice to succumb to that adversary or indeed they will use the situation to make themselves strong and do something important in their life.
“The number one thing I want to bring to Belfast is light and I want people to go home and say maybe they didn’t understand cervical spondylotic myelopathy but the bit about love and hope, they understood. I
AHIS SCHOOL DAYS
want people to understand they’re man’s best friend from 20,000 years ago when we first befriended the dog right to 200 years from now when we look at the type of work we would like future generations to inherit. “When I was a kid my friends were the animals, especially our sheepdog, Pirate, but the experience shaped me profoundly. “It was the belief that a creature like a cow owed its existence solely to its value as a provider of milk, whereas I saw them as sentient creatures with their own needs and wants.
“People might say sure they’re only animals, why bother? But we’re all
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only animals.
The world would be very lonely without animals, I believe they’ve as much right to the planet as we do. And without them, humanity can’t have any drug or implant.”
Sunday’s SSE Arena show will take the audience on a tour of surgeries from the Teatro Anatomico in Bologna, Italy, when animals and humans were operated on as a theatre show.
Noel said: “They were worked on side-by-side in a spectacle of joy of revelation and discovery.
“At that time the religious authorities didn’t really like the surgeries maybe because it was threatened certain things they believed.
“So there was a lot of prejudice. We look at how back then human and
animal medicine diverged and now what we might do with the knowledge we have to treat cancer, to treat arthritis, to treat pain and most importantly to treat the big vacuum in society that I feel should be filled with love, and it’s what we want to create from that that’s important.
“So during the show I’ll be taking you though on a surgical time machine in Belfast through from 1637 to maybe 20 or 30 years from now so we can actually see the future before it happens in real life.
“Some things are just about looking at stuff differently and making it work.
“On Sunday at the SSE Arena in Belfast we can make the world a better place for one night and hopefully into the future.”