FRINGE COMEDY SPECIAL See tomorrow’s

Because it is so easy to do that.”

It is about being vigilant about his triggers, he adds. “Everywhere I go now it’s ‘This way, Mr McGarvey …’ which is nice and satisfying because I know there are a lot of people out there who, if they’d had their way, would have had my career derailed before it started.”

McGarvey catches himself. “But that’s resentment. Did you see that coming out of me there?” He looks thoroughly self-chastised. I suggest to him that most humans feel resentment on some level? “But for me, that gets me drunk. That is what I need to watch,” he replies.

“There is a lot of people out there where I’m like: ‘Oh, aye. Get it up ye!’ And thinking it feels good at the time. I’m not saying it to them, but in my head, I’m thinking it. That becomes an engine room for me. It is corrosive. I need to be in a place where I can forgive and forget, move on and help others. That is the key: helping others. Not just by writing books about poverty. I mean sitting with someone who is rattling off a methadone script. But the constraints on my time, the emotional impact of all of this. Deep down I’m not a very confident person.”

Family life is his anchor. McGarvey and his partner Becci Wallace, 31, a singer-songwriter and lecturer, have two children – Daniel, two, and three-month-old Lily – and he clearly loves fatherhood.

“It is about being able to provide them with the material and emotional resources to deal with stress a little better than I have in the past,” he says. “Having children is everything, it is beautiful and profound. For me, the best thing about it is having something else at the centre of my life. See when it is all about me? That’s when I am ill.”

One of the most jarring parts of Poverty Safari is when he talks about how, for a long time, McGarvey believed that “withholding my DNA” would be his “greatest gift to the world”.

“Aye. I thought I was defective. I thought that if I passed these genes on to someone else, then who knows what might happen? That was at a different time in my life where I was drinking all the time and my whole perception of reality was so askew. These habits we pass onto our kids are not just behavioural – it is wired into our DNA. If I raise my son in the same environment I was raised in, then all those little systems come online.”

Recent weeks have seen him deactivate his Twitter account on a couple of occasions and talk about doing likewise with Facebook. Is it a case of circling the wagons and making sure he has the right people around him? “That’s what I am doing. It is just taking the necessary precautions.”

McGarvey draws an analogy between the long-lasting impact of stress and the fight-or-flight response many of us have experienced when undergoing a painful procedure at the dentist.

“Imagine you woke up in the dentist’s chair every day. People who grow up in stress are primed for stress. No matter that my living conditions technically aren’t as stressful now,