Heart The matter of the
Last September, Jason Byrne was out running when he felt a pain in his chest. What he did next saved his life. Donal O’donoghue talks to him
“When you get a belt like a health scare, it can change your outlook on life,” says the comedian and TV host Jason Byrne (49), who had five stents inserted last October following a heart scare (high cholesterol, a hereditary condition, had blocked three arteries). “But my outlook on life had changed before my operation. In February 2020, I watched my dad die. I held his hand and I saw how fragile life is in that moment. I watched my dad breathe out and all the energy left him. And if there’s one thing I believe, it’s that we are all balls of energy and I watched that energy leave my dad and go wherever he wanted it to go. Every bit of Paddy Byrne was gone in that instant.”
Jason Byrne is very much here, bursting with thought and talk. When I
call, he’s putting petrol in his car so I ring back. “Just after you hung up a bus-load of children got off a bus and I thought I’d be stuck behind them for ages as they bought sweets and stuff.”
He was in the thick of filming Clear History, the RTÉ show where familiar faces tell stories against themselves: “Like Jason Mcateer recalls how after he scored a crucial goal against Holland he was told that Bono had organised a helicopter to fly him to Slane. Jason didn’t believe it and went off for a pint. So Bono came on stage, an Irish flag wrapped around him, and said: ‘Imagine if you were Jason Mcateer.’”
I can’t imagine being Jason Byrne. Too exhausting. “As long as I’m busy I’m happy,” he says. So the comedian kept busy during the lockdowns, co-hosting the mental health podcast, Mind Your Loaf, doing the odd corporate gig and emceeing a quiz show online from his bathroom.
“At one point there were over a thousand people watching me hold up different props in my toilet as they texted in their answers.” He was also banned from Tiktok for a sketch where he’s leppin’ about in his underpants, pretending to be Joe Wicks, a pair of women’s tights filled with a sock around his waist. “It looks like a willy and they banned me and I’m thinking it’s not a real willy, ye eejits.”
Beyond the comic fringe , there is a serious side to Byrne. “My dad had a lovely phrase, which I have up on the wall. It is: If you worry, you will die, but if you don’t worry, you’re also going to die, so why worry.” Yet I reckon he does: so he minds his health, physical and mental. “I’ve been in therapy for all sorts of things. I had always done meditation but I was getting exhausted gigging and my whole life was getting a bit tough. So I turned to exercise and then therapy. On the day before the stents were put in, I was on the phone to my therapist. I was getting upset but she was wonderful, reassuring me, saying that I had dodged a bullet.”
The warning shot came last September. Byrne was running on Portmarnock beach when he got a pain in his chest (“like two fingers pressing into my heart”). That day, he rang his GP, was referred to a cardiologist and ultimately had to have the five stents inserted. “I had three blocked arteries. Two were 70% blocked and one was at 90% blockage.” A regular runner and cyclist with a healthy diet (non-smoker, rarely drinks), he was upset with the diagnosis of high cholesterol. “I don’t usually cry but when I heard that I started to well up. I was sure that they were wrong but they said it’s genetic.”
He now attends cardio rehab in Beaumont Hospital, Dublin, and is on aspirin to thin his blood and statins to help lower his cholesterol. “Professor O’hanlon (his cardiologist), told me that I was lucky because I was caught very early. He also said to me ‘I’ll keep an eye on you for the rest of your life’ and I was like a child going, ‘Thank you so much!’”
Before the procedure, Jason kept his worries from his teenage boys, Devin and Daniel. “You don’t let your children know how worried you are,” he says. “They are not idiots but when they saw that I was not worried they didn’t worry.”
He still chats with his late father. “I talk to him in the car all the time,” he says. “He’s sitting behind me with his cigarette and I’m going, ‘Dad you can’t be smoking in the car’ and he just goes ‘Ah shurrup.’” He has written a play, Paddy Lama Shed Talks, crammed with his father’s sayings, with Jason playing both father and son in a one-man show that is primed for the Edinburgh Festival. “There’s this phrase that if you don’t talk about someone when they pass away, they die twice,” he says. “I love keeping my dad alive in that way, his image forming in my head. If I didn’t talk about him, he would just fade away until I couldn’t remember him any more.”
Jason Byrne will be 50 on February 25. “Age never bothered me because I feel like I’ve lived 700 lives already,” he says. “In the 25 years of my career, I’ve done the Royal Variety Show, gigged across the world, met amazing people and done crazy s**t. I got a message recently from someone who was down, having just turned 50. The first thing I said to her was find as many people as possible who are a good laugh and spent the time with them. And the second thing I said was that there are only two days you can do nothing about: yesterday and tomorrow. So just have the craic today!”