RTE star Emer O'Neill has revealed Tommy Tiernan has apologised to her and removed his controversial joke from his set.
Last week, the Bray native told the Irish Mirror she walked out of the comedian’s Vicar Street gig last Friday week after becoming upset over a controversial joke he told about taxi drivers. The mum-of-two said her “heart sank” as he began telling the audience a joke about Dublin Zoo and taxi drivers, forcing the Today Show host to walk out of the gig.
After publicising her upset, Emer has now revealed that Tommy has since apologised to her for the "hurt" he caused her.
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The Navan native wrote her an email, writing: “Dear Emer, I’m so sorry about the hurt that a joke I told at Vicar Street on Friday night has caused you. It was never my intention for this to happen and I take full responsibility for it. It was dropped immediately from the set.
“I’m sorry that you came along hoping for a good night out and then got shocked and upset by something that I said. If you wish to speak with me about it, please send me your phone number. You were right to call it out as offensive and I will do my level best to make sure that something like this never happens again. Yours, Tommy Tiernan.”
Reacting to his response, Emer said: “I emailed him saying thanks for your email and your words and that I welcome a call."
“So he rang me. He seemed very genuine in his words. He expressed that a middle-aged white man has no right to decide what was offensive or not or racist or not considering the fact that he has no lived experience from an ethnic minority community or what it is like to be one, which I felt was extremely powerful.
“I stopped him there and said 'thank you for saying that. You don’t understand how immense a statement like that is'.
“He said ‘I didn’t really get it until now, but I get it now.’ I was like ‘I appreciate you saying that,’ I really do because it takes people a long time to get there to that realisation and the understanding that it happens all the time where white people tell black people how they should and shouldn’t feel and tell them what’s racist and what’s not considering they have no idea what out our day to day lives are like.
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“He told me he had taken the joke from the set straight away and that he had only thought of the joke earlier that day and in hindsight didn’t give it as much thought as he should have on reflection and that it has been taken from the set immediately.”
The mum-of-two told him that he has “such a massive platform to really make a difference in this situation” and she hopes he will use his notoriety to “educate others”.
“Words coming from white people about this topic for some reason hold so much more weight than coming from people from our own community.
“He also has a much bigger following and fanbase than any ethnic minority group in the country," she told us.
The row between the pair erupted after Tiernan began telling a joke to the audience about walking around Dublin Zoo.
Emer told us at the time: “He starts the joke, and he starts talking about penguins looking like nuns with the rosary beads and I thought ‘nice one’ and I’m laughing.
“Then he talks about the wolves and their fierceness or their strength (reminding him of the Irish) - this is all paraphrasing because this just happened – and then he goes ‘then I went to the ‘African Savannah’ and my heart sank a little bit as soon as I heard the word ‘Africa’.
“I just thought ‘please don’t do this to me. I’m literally one of the only people of colour sitting here full of a room of white people’.
“And then came the savannah and taxi drivers. He acknowledged that the room was full of white people” and said that everyone is laughing so it mustn't be a racist joke.”
The anti-racism activist decided to highlight the incident on her Instagram account.
She later told her Instagram of the incident: "A night that was to be fun and full of laughter turned sour with a way too close to the bone joke by @officialtommedian at his @vicar_st gig tonight.”
Emer recalled to the Irish Mirror how she felt “alone and isolated” at the gig.
“Being there, I spoke about feeling so isolated and so alone. Having my fellow Irishman laugh hysterically at this and also my Irishness being stripped of me because I no longer felt Irish in that room because I was part of the stereotype. I was now black African. There is so much trauma in that situation itself, let alone what the aftermath caused.
“Not only was it an attack against me, personally. That’s how it began. But it transforms into something entirely different."
But speaking about the call with Tiernan, Emer said she was "shocked by his candidness" and found their chat really "positive".
“Yes. It was really positive. I’m not going to lie; I was shocked at his candidness. It was clear that he had really done some reflection over what had happened and the fact that he took ownership and said, ‘it was offensive, and you were right to call me out’.
“It really said a lot. It said a lot about him and just the fact that he pulled it straight away from the gig.
“Obviously if he didn’t believe it was a racist stereotype, he wouldn’t have pulled it from the show and he wouldn’t have written me the email, nor would he have rang me and spoke to me apologising again.”
But Emer said she would like it if Tommy would make a public statement reflecting their interactions as the comedian has remained silent in the media since the controversy.
"I think it was in my ignorance that I assumed he would make a public statement reiterating our conversations, but he has made it clear to me that he feels he has done enough by emailing me and taking the joke from the set.
“My issue with this is that this entire ordeal has not only affected me but it has affected my entire community as the commentary transformed from a horrendous attack against me and my family to an attack on all people of colour with the common rhetoric being leave Ireland to the Irish and all of you need to go back to Africa.
“Not to mention people from our ethnic minority community being described as 'not really Irish just wannabes'. "Although I appreciate the personal apology and aknowledgement I do believe that the people of Ireland ally's and our community at least deserve some sort of statement of Tommy’s reflection and actions taken since the telling of the joke.”
A rep for Tommy Tiernan has been contacted.
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