BY JUDY MURPHY

For someone who played a key role in the evolution of Ireland’s contemporary comedy scene, Billy McGrath isn’t especially well-known as a funny man.

That’s because, since the 1990s, he’s worked mostly behind the scenes, setting up a successful comedy club in Dublin in the early 1990s, then giving advice and support to Galway residents Cillian Fennell and Pearse Boyce when they wanted to establish a similar club in the West.

“I gave them phone numbers and told them that when I was inviting comedians to play in Dublin, they could invite them to Galway on the back of that. By the end of the 1990s, there was a network of venues around the country,” Dublin-born Billy explains. And, he adds, Tommy Tiernan was among those who cut their teeth at the Galway Comedy Club.

But Billy did perform stand-up in the 1980s, starting off as a student at UCD with the Milligan Revue and then under the moniker Billy Magra. Now aged 70, he’s back on the road with a new show, Gusto, which will premiere in the Town Hall Studio next Friday, February 17.

“I wanted to challenge myself,” he says of his decision, despite being apprehensive that people may not know him as a comedian. Billy began writing Gusto before Covid and continued working on it during the pandemic, when he also graduated with an MA in screenwriting from Dublin’s IADT. It’s all about  challenging himself.

Not that he needs to prove anything. In a long and varied career, he worked as a director and commissioning editor with RTÉ, he did PR for MCD and for the Galway Arts Festival (in 1991 and 1992) and for groups including the Chieftains and Clannad. He also co-managed comedian Seán Hughes who went on to international success. Before that again, Billy had a stint organising rock gigs – including a year at the Castle in Salthill. That began by accident, he explains.

In July 1975, a month after he’d taken over as Ents Officer at UCD, three members of the Miami Showband were massacred by the UVF in County Down. British bands cancelled all their Irish gigs as a result of that atrocity. Billy was left with dates to fill at UCD, so he cast his net locally.

One of the first acts he booked were the Boomtown Rats who played at Belfield to an audience of 2,000.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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