"How am I going to tell him that his granddad didn't die in an accident at work?"
Comedian Patrick Kielty has been praised following an emotional interview where he discussed processing his father's murder.
The Down native spoke about John Kielty's death on
Sunday with Miriam on RTÉ Radio 1 today (24 April).
"Society was different, and extraordinary, but never expecting that that is going to come home to your door," Kielty said.
"Everything was a news story, everything was happening to somebody else.
"Most of the trouble was in Belfast, so if you were in a little village where no one had been killed or attacked, so the idea that the knock on the door was going to come to your house, that the police and the parish priest was going to talk to your mother, that your dad's best friend was going to be coming into school...
"I was putting up posters for Comic Relief, I thought I was in trouble for putting up the posters, and to see my dad's best friend, Brian Cunningham, visibly shaken.
"The headmaster says 'Patrick, I think you'd better sit down', and you're going 'what's this about?', and [he said] 'your dad's been shot'.
"It was like playing tennis. 'Your dad's been shot.' 'Is he dead?' 'Yes.'"
Kielty described going into survival mode, and burying some of the trauma of his father's murder, but that he's now processing the event "from a distance".
"Looking back on it now, it, sometimes, becomes much easier, like I'm chatting about it now, I'm comfortable with it, but sometimes you get blindsided by something that catches you out."
Kielty spoke about meeting a young loyalist protester, Joel Keys, and Bronagh McConville, granddaughter of Jean McConville, a woman murdered by the IRA, and discussing generational trauma.
"She didn't live through what happened to her granny, but the fact that she was living with her dad and their family and they had gone through it, and suddenly she was going through trauma, the wheels start ticking here and you start thinking 'how am I dealing with this?'
"When I set to sit down [my sons] James Kielty and Milo Kielty to have this chat about what happened to Granda Kielty, am I going to be fully formed here? What am I going to tell them? How am I going to feel about it? How am I going to feel about how I have now outlived Granda Kielty?"
Kielty then got emotional speaking about a moment when his children were playing football at John Kielty Memorial Park as the lights were being changed.
"My eldest fella goes 'that's amazing, it never gets dark at Kielty Park'.
"That blindsides you.
"You're thinking to yourself, okay, how am I going to break this down now?
"How am I going to tell him that his granddad didn't die in an accident at work?"
Kielty said how he felt lucky that he was surrounded with support in his career.
"I've only just realised recently that, maybe you didn't have your dad, but by God, you had so many people in your corner that you didn't know," Kielty explained.
Kielty is currently on tour in Ireland and Britain performing "
Borderline", a stand-up special where he discusses the impact of Brexit on the border.
https://twitter.com/PatricKielty/status/1518171041398501376?s=20&t=MWAIbSB8H2NDFhMuhP53oQ
