Rory O’Connor AKA Rory’s Stories has said the new RTE project he is working on, filmed in Mountjoy Prison, will be “groundbreaking” TV.
The comedian and social media star, 35, is working with Dublin GAA footballer Philly McMahon to coach a team of prisoners in Gaelic football and helping them to get fit, as well as working with them to help overcome their addiction and mental health issues.
Rory said he believes the show will highlight important questions in society about how people end up in prison and said he thinks it will be a “really powerful project”.
Speaking to the Irish Mirror, Rory said: “I started a TV production which is being kept under wraps at the minute but all I’ll say is I believe it’s going to be groundbreaking TV.
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“It’ll be on RTE next spring and it’s all the morals that I carry - that not everyone is a bad egg and how people go off the wrong road.
“Listening to these people’s stories hopefully might inspire people in that position. I really do believe that it’s going to be a really powerful project. It’s never been done before.”
Filming for the new show is already underway and the programme, known as the Mountjoy GAA project, is set to be shown on our screens next spring.
It will focus on the prison’s Progression Unit which accommodates around 150 prisoners in the former St Patrick’s Institute for young offenders building.
Rory said: “We have a team of lads that I believe are good fellows that just went wrong.”
“I think it’s going to raise a lot of questions in society that should have been raised years ago and people can learn from others' mistakes, and not everyone is a bad egg and people can make mistakes and that can happen to you, me, my brother, your brother, my sister, your sister.
“It’s a thin line and that’s what the project is all about - that any one of us can go off the wrong road.”
The Meath man also opened up about another major moment in his life after being diagnosed with dyslexia three months ago - at the age of 35.
He said the form of dyslexia he struggles with is retaining information. He explained that when he is reading a passage he is “so focused on reading the words [my] mind is actually not taking in any information.”
He said: “I believed I was stupid for a long time because I couldn’t spell like everyone else, I couldn’t write like everyone else, I couldn’t learn like everyone else.
“It took me a while to assess that and with getting the diagnosis just made me feel a bit better in myself. I know I’m not stupid, my mind just thinks a bit differently than most.”
He said it has been “a mixture of relief but also frustration” and has put his school days in perspective. Rory said: “A moment of clarity came over me and I was like ‘this is my whole experience of school’.
“It was very frustrating, I got in a lot of trouble in school. I went to primary school in the 90s where it was a lot more old-fashioned and teachers just thought you were a bold boy and I got kicked out of class.”
He said he can see how his negative experience of learning had "a long-term effect on his self confidence and self belief” and believes his addiction to gambling stemmed from the knock in confidence he experienced at school.
However, he said he feels like one of the “lucky ones” to have made it through and have found something he is passionate about.
“It definitely had a long-term effect on my self confidence and self belief,” he said.
“I struggled with a bit of addiction and stuff like that because you’re trying to look for an escapism and gambling, for a good while, was that.
“But thankfully I’ve knocked that on the head now and I use my [experience with] addiction on a positive platform now with my social media and my shows and the books now.
“But I’m one of the lucky ones because there’s lads that I went to school with that are still struggling with life because they’ve just given up on themselves because of the way education was for them. And addiction then is your best friend because alcohol numbs the pain, cocaine or gambling numbs the pain.”
Despite having dyslexia, one of Rory's most recent projects is a writing his fourth book - this one is based on the era of recent Irish history that most people are only too happy to forget although he manages to make it a light-hearted read.
Rory’s Stories Lockdown Lookback recalls all of the ridiculous Covid moments - like garda checkpoints for staying in your 2km radius, the nine-euro meals and shivering outdoors at a pub in winter only to be kicked out after 105 mins.
Rory’s shares his own hilarious anecdotes along with confessions from the public about what the rest of Ireland got up to during those strange two years.
There’s one story about a concerned Irish mother who made her family dip their feet in a basin of bleach before coming into the house - something like a hybrid between Covid and foot-and-mouth disease.
Another anecdote in the book tells of a man being spotted walking home after a night of heavy drinking, swaying into the middle of a country road without a soul around, but wearing a mask the entire time to be safe from Covid - never mind being hit by passing car.
Rory openly shares his own experience of lockdown in the book which saw him and his wife Emma and kids move back in with his parents to save money for a deposit for a house - something many young people in Ireland today have had to resort to.
He said it left him feeling like a teenager again and led to a few awkward encounters that he documents in the book - one in particular about how his youngest daughter Lucy, now almost two, was conceived while living under his parents roof.
"You feel like you're 14 again," he said. "Even if it's a Friday night and you're going to the fridge to get a can, your mother is eyeballing you from the kitchen to see how many cans you're taking out of the fridge.
"You feel like you're a teenager going out to drink in the fields again trying to slide the cans in to your pocket.
"Here's me 34 years of age, couple of kids and married, and here I am slying cans out of the fridge so my mother won't give me a lecture.
"And then it goes without saying that me and my wife [were] trying to get intimate living with paper thin walls between my mother and father's room. People can relate to the real-life awkwardness to the whole situation!"
The Rory's Stories: Lockdown Lookback is out now in bookstores for €12.99.
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