Tackling Ireland’s woes with satire and songs

Satirist, musician and all-round thinking person Paddy Cullivan has a song in his new show that compares the Irish soccer team to the IRA, because they were more active in the 1990s than they are now and because they give 90 minutes’ notice before they plan any attack.

What really annoys him is that the current head of the FAI, John Delaney is getting paid north of €350,000 a year while Ireland’s soccer supporters are being fed a diet of past glory. Not good enough, he says.

Galway-born Paddy, who is known for his work on Callan’s Kicks, Funny Friday with Joe Duffy, the Kilkenomics Festival and Leviathan Political Cabaret, will bring the multi-media show, Solutionism, to Galway next Thursday night, October 8.

In just 90 minutes, using song, chat and images, he will offer 50 solutions to Ireland’s ongoing social, political and economic woes and offer ideas for a more equal society.

“It’s about taking the clichés we are told by the establishment, taking them apart and showing the solutions,” he explains. Many of these are radical.

‘Fire every public servant and re-hire the good ones’ is one, while ‘Re-roof Ireland’ is another. One that many of us might enjoy is the proposal that ‘All politicians should live on the street for a week’. Less popular, in Galway anyway, Paddy reckons, is his proposal that 'Ireland must take a year off alcohol'.

The show will begin and end with a song – there’ll be six in total – and will have lots of imagery throughout, as well as many references to Paddy’s home city of Galway.

The famous film, Ryan’s Daughter, shot in Kerry in the late 1960s, will be invoked, as Paddy discusses how a village built as a film-set was later demolished – the only building left standing was a schoolhouse. That’s now a popular tourist attraction. But its roof blew off in a storm last January. Locals would like to see it fixed, but the schoolhouse is owned by Tony Ryan’s family, who have no interest in repairing it.

This could serve as a metaphor for Ireland, Paddy feels.

Firstly, if we reroofed all the unfinished estates, we’d have houses for homeless people. And on a larger scale, “we need to stop letting the rain in on Ireland, while money is seeping out and, more importantly, people are seeping out”.

Behind the quick humour– and he promises there’ll be plenty of that in Solutionism – Paddy is angry and upset about the state of Ireland. And he’s concerned that we seem to be sleepwalking our way back to the behaviour that caused the economic collapse of 2008.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.