Tommy Tiernan learns about the absurdity of discrimination

This week's Independent News & Media Irish regional newspapers'  column.

Michael Commane

 On Friday evening, June 21 I was TV surfing and landed on The Tommy Tiernan Show.

For those readers who are not familiar with the RTE One television programme, neither Tiernan nor the studio audience knows who the guests are in advance.

When I landed on the show with my zapper Tommy was interviewing Aoife McLysaght.

Tiernan, wearing a black hat, the type of hat my grandfather wore, does a mix of comedy and serious in the show. But most of all there is a serious strain right through the show, at least that’s been the case in the bits and pieces I have watched in this series.

In my ignorance I had never heard of Aoife McLysaght but the moment I tuned in she caught my attention and I was captivated by her.

I listened to her to the end. It was one of those occasions I regretted not having the playback facility on my television. Some months ago I closed down my account with my television provider and had a free-to-air system installed.

Aoife McLysaght is a molecular scientist and is a professor in the Molecular Evolution Laboratory at the Smurfit Institute of Genetics at Trinity College Dublin. She has written for many scientific journals and is on the editorial board of a journal called ‘Cell Reports’.

Tommy was telling her that he was no good at science and that his talent was in the direction of imagination. McLysaght quickly quipped that many people have a completely wrong understanding of science and that imagination is a vital ingredient for scientific scholarship.

She went on to talk about our Deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA. When Tiernan heard this of course he made a wisecrack. But Aoife went on to explain how through a study of DNA it’s demonstrably clear that all human beings share so much in common. And that led her on to say that any discrimination between people is simply laughable. The idea that one group of people would discriminate against another group because of the colour of their skin was absurd, she said. That we would discriminate on grounds of pigmentation difference is for Aoife a madness and simply superficial.

She had me sitting at the edge of my seat. Just think of all the ways we separate people, all the idiotic tricks we use to discriminate against one another.

Look at what we do in our schools, we have fee-paying schools and non-fee-paying ones. We begin that nasty trick of discriminating against each other from the day we are born. And then we go on to make building blocks which cause more and more discrimination.

We seem to be experts at it. The divisions that we create on grounds of religion, wealth, intelligence, ethnicity, nationality, health, everything and then the importance that we give to our stupidity.

The difference between any two human beings is infinitesimal and just look at the damage we cause by thinking there are such important and historic differences between us.

And all that silly talk that Muslims are different from Christians, that blacks are different from whites, that socialists are different from conservatives.

It’s most probably a conniving trick of those who make arms so that we can use them to kill our enemies.

That ever-so-tiny difference between each of us makes us unique but not necessarily better.

Aoife McLysaght kept insisting right through the interview how little she knows. That too was most interesting.

There is a lot more to Tommy Tiernan than a comedian.

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