Tadhg Hickey: Why I went to Iran
The comic is no stranger to controversy but a recent trip to Tehran drew fire. Here, he answers criticisms, telling Dónal Lynch why he accepted the invitation
Bnd obby Sands Street in downtown Tehran wasn’t much to look at but it was still important for Tadhg Hickey to see it during his recent visit to Iran, the comedian says. He was in the Iranian capital last week to speak on a festival panel about his solidarity with the Palestinians and for many this dusty avenue represents a potent symbol of resistance.
“It’s right outside the British embassy. They changed the name of the street [from Winston Churchill Street] after Bobby Sands died. They’ve really got [understood] the history. They knew Ireland’s history intimately and Ireland’s role in anti-imperialism generally.”
The reality may be slightly more complex. In 1981 the then Tehran authorities had wanted to frustrate and embarrass the British government and their goal was apparently achieved when British diplomats moved the entrance to their embassy.
These manoeuvres distracted from an underlying truth: that the Iranians’ apparent solidarity with the Irish cause came with its own agenda and hypocrisy.
Even as the Tehran regime memorialised Sands, “many imprisoned Iranian opposition members were conducting their own hunger strikes to protest against IRI’s [Islamic Republic of Iran] brutal prison regime”, according to Mansour Bonakdarian, a professor at New York’s Pratt Institute, who has extensively researched the subject.
In casting itself as an international champion of the underdog, the Iranian regime appeared to cynically appropriate an Irish martyr. Many who saw photos and videos of Hickey’s visit to Iran wondered if he was being used in a similar way.
Palestine has long been seen as the victim of a proxy war, with the US funding and supporting Israel and its military, and Iran funding and supporting Hamas. The arts and their influence on Western perceptions of the conflict have their place on this geopolitical chessboard and Hickey has been notably vocal on social media with his outrage about the war in Gaza.
From his base in Cork he has produced sketches which, sometimes didactically, lay bare the contradictions and rationalisations on the Israeli side. Several of them have gone viral. His invitation to a film festival in Tehran came on the back of this activism.
“It was themed on Gaza and there was some round-table discussions around Palestine and activism. I knew there were a couple of other journalists [going] that I really respected that are doing anti-imperialist material. It was a good opportunity to collaborate with them I suppose.
“I weighed it up and I talked to a few people beforehand. I’m obviously aware of the human rights issues there. But I thought, I’m not going to do puff pieces for the government. I wanted to speak to ordinary Iranians, which I got to do. They’re such a lovely people and they’re completely hobbled and destroyed in many cases by, you know, the US and its sanctions.”
Some ordinary Iranians live in fear of a more homegrown persecution. In April, Iranian hip -hop star Toomaj Salehi was sentenced to death over raps that criticised the Iranian government. Did that give Hickey pause for thought when he accepted the invitation to Tehran?
“Of course, it would give me pause for thought that not just an artist, but any human being who’s carrying out protests against the government is facing those kinds of consequences,” he says.
“Was I going there to support the government and to say the government’s great? No I wasn’t.”
He did, however, take to the streets, and not in protest, on the day of the funeral of President Raisi, the hardline cleric who led Iran until his death on May 19. In 2022, a year after his election in a tightly controlled vote, the then mid-ranking cleric ordered tighter enforcement of Iran’s “hijab and chastity law” restricting women’s dress and behaviour. Within weeks, a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, died in custody after being arrested by ‘morality police’ for allegedly violating that law.
A year later, The Guardian reported that Amini’s father “was temporarily detained
by Iranian security forces on the anniversary of her death in an attempt to stop people gathering at her grave amid strikes and protests across the country”.
“I didn’t know much about the president,” Hickey says. “I wasn’t going over as an expert on domestic Iranian politics. I was asked questions about him while I was there because obviously everyone was talking about it.
“I went on the streets the day that his funeral was happening because it was a momentous experience and I wanted to be there, and there were millions of people on the street and I was one of only a few Westerners. I was made to feel so welcome.
“The Iranians are very resilient. You know, basically their economy is kind of effectively reverse engineered. They just have to try and find a way in spite of the sanctions. And so their kind of anti-Americanism is completely to do with the American state. It’s not about American people.”
The US has not been alone in enacting sanctions. The EU began a targeted regime against Iran in 2011 but since October 2022 the EU has “drastically increased restrictive measures, adopting 10 packages of sanctions,” according to the website of the European Council. An EU statement issued on September 13, 2023 said: “One year ago, the 22 year old woman Mahsa Amini was killed while in custody of the Iranian morality police. Her death sparked a nationwide movement”. It called on Iran to eliminate “systemic discrimination against women and girls”, noted a “worrying increase in executions over the [previous] year” and called for a cessation to “arbitrary detention, including of EU and dual EU-Iranian citizens.”
Another moment, caught on camera and posted online, Hickey is seen chanting in Farsi “death to Israel”.
“That was literally bumping into a man speaking Farsi and me having full no Farsi and messing about. He taught me a chant and I repeated it and somebody caught it on film. It wasn’t like I’d hit the streets, like trying to drum up anti-Israel sentiment, although that’s definitely on the streets. It was just a bit of a mess around.”
But does saying something as incendiary as that, however naively, not open him up to a charge of anti-Semitism?
“I don’t think so, because, again, I would be if we were conflating the state of Israel with Judaism. I think we need to be really, really clearcut with that conflation and not go there. So, for instance, if there were chanting ‘death to South Africa’ during apartheid-era South Africa, I don’t think anybody would bat an eyelid at that. To say death to that country as it currently stands and as it is currently operating, I don’t think is a controversial thing to say at all.”
Hickey’s activism sprung from the horror of seeing the war in Gaza – in which nearly 37,000 Palestinians, including 15,000 children, have been killed – unfold on social media and from his solidarity with Palestinian friends in Cork and further afield.
He acknowledges that he is a “comedian, not an expert” and that much of his knowledge about the history of Israel and the conflict in Gaza is derived from “reading bits and pieces”.
However, his sincerity is hard to doubt. “I’m talking to Palestinians here in Ireland who are shocked that the West would allow this level of horror to be rained down upon their civilian population.”
He has been criticised for his stance on Israel but, of course, public sentiment here has been supportive of the Palestinians.
Hickey starred in the RTÉ sitcom
The School and he has a huge online following. Several of his videos, which blend politics and satire, went viral during the pandemic. Last year he published his memoir, A Portrait of the Piss Artist as a Young Man, which detailed his tough upbringing in Cork city and his long struggle with addiction and mental health issues. The book detailed a cycle of ups and downs which did make the reader wonder if further turbulence might go on even after its publication. Hickey says that his activism has been something of a talisman against this.
“Generally speaking my mental health is very good because, and I don’t want to be too reductive around this, but because I feel like I’m doing good work or meaningful work that means something to other people, that’s very good for my soul.
“A lot of my alcoholism, as you would have probably read, is, you know, bound up in selfishness and self-centredness and self-obsession, I suppose. So the more I’m doing that’s not thinking about myself, the better.”
The other side of that coin is that altruism can easily trip into obsession.
“You can’t do it [activism] so much that you’re not sleeping and showering. Just because I’m not drinking doesn’t mean that I don’t have to check in on my mental illness, definitely on a daily basis.
“There were times where I was on Al Ja- zeera, like, you know, f**king every day for hours. And my partner would say, ‘Look, there’s no actual good to what you’re doing right now.’ It’s one thing being aware of what’s going on, but like, you’re kind of just losing yourself in it a little bit.
“So I would definitely take breaks, but it’s tough to take breaks when you’ve got Palestinian friends who take no breaks. Absolutely, it’s a balancing act with alcoholism. Because when you stop drinking, that’s only the beginning of your healing.”
Russell Brand has written about how the egotism of addiction can come out in other ways, and that a toxic self-regard can simmer away even while one is ostensibly helping other people.
“I know where he’s coming from,” Hickey says. “I feel like you get a good gut instinct [about when that is happening]. At no point in the last few months have I felt like, ‘Oh yes, this is great now, I’m a great lad’, you know, because I do get that feeling with other things.
“Obviously, I’m aware that my following is growing and I’m getting invited to places and I’m getting recognition. That’s all great, but the fact that it is for a cause I’ve literally been passionate about my whole life and I found a way to add my voice, it just all fits together in a way that thankfully the ego hasn’t come into it.”
Making comedy about something that’s obviously no laughing matter – Gaza – has been challenging, he says.
“The way I balance it is I do often wander into didacticism and I get punished by the fact people aren’t interested in it at all and don’t want to hear my expert opinion on things because I’m not an expert.
“You still end up sometimes preaching a little bit in a sketch and it often doesn’t do as well. Sketch satire is at its very best where the thing that you’ve made is funny in and of itself and it actually doesn’t need the allegory or analogy, but it just fits snugly on it and gives it that extra level.”
Though his own fame is very much social media-based, he deplores politicians leveraging it for easy wins. He “politely disagrees” with the notion that Taoiseach
It’s a grassroots movement of people looking at the news and thinking, ‘I’m not accepting this’
Simon Harris has been strong on support for Palestine.
“Simon Harris understands social media quite well. He’s got a thriving Instagram page. I think that one of the reasons why he was chosen as leader, in my opinion, is because he’s on TikTok. He knows as well as I do that if you say the right thing about Palestine, your clips are going to go viral.
“He recognises Palestinian statehood, which, don’t get me wrong, is very significant. But if you really wanted to stick your head above the parapet... you’d sanction Israel, you’d end trade with Israel.”
The caravan of social media outrage often moves on. Palestine is the cause du jour but does he still think we will still be as interested in it two years from now?
“I hope I’m not still talking about it because I’d like to think that things like Palestinian statehood and justice and liberation will happen in that time frame.
“You’ve got to be hopeful that the difference between Ukraine and Palestine, to use that example, is that a tribe, a worldwide tribe has sprouted in support of Palestine because the support wasn’t there from the media class or the political class. It’s a grassroots movement of ordinary people looking at the news on their phones and thinking, ‘I’m not accepting this’.”