Comedian, writer and actor Tadhg Hickey has found himself in the sights of Irish media after a recent visit to Lebanon to attend the funeral of former Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in September 2024.
Corkman Hickey had shot to fame with his often-political online sketches and a superb autobiography that dealt frankly with his alcoholism, but his outspoken, unapologetic and often angry defence of the Palestinian people has seen offers for both commercial and artistic work dry up.
He has also become the subject of a number of articles in Irish media about his activism and his travels to Iran and Lebanon, and questioning his motives and who was fitting the bill for his travels.
“Did it (going to the funeral) mean that I necessarily support every single thing that Hezbollah does? Of course not. Do people in the West support every single thing their government does when they go to America or go to Canada or go to Britain?” Hickey said on a recent episode of the MOTH News Unvetted podcast.
“You know, I didn't think we'd need to still be having these conversations, but unfortunately, the way the West looks at things, and certainly Western journalists, it's extremely black and white.”
Hickey said he travelled to Lebanon to visit people he knew and see the camps housing refugees there, as well as to honour the memory of Nasrallah, and in particular his anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist stance.
“There were no there were no Western reporters there – I didn't see anybody from my part of the world there at all, so I felt like it was incumbent on me to at least record what I was seeing when I was seeing evidence of ongoing Israeli war crimes,” Hickey explained.
Hickey is strongly critical of Western media coverage of the ongoing situation in Gaza, during which a United Nations Special Committee described Israel’s actions as “consistent with the characteristics of genocide, with mass civilian casualties and life-threatening conditions intentionally imposed on Palestinians there.”
The articles questioning Hickey’s funding and his politics are part of an effort to undermine pro-Palestinian voices, Hickey said, but that any attempts to link him to extremism or terrorism are doomed to fail.
“I'm not part of any organization. I've never been part of a political party in my life. I don't represent anyone. I don't work for anyone. I can't get any work in Ireland since (the Hamas incursion into Israel on) October 7, so why it was of the national interest to kind of discredit me?” he said.
Hickey’s unwavering support for the Palestinian cause has seen stand-up gigs cancelled and well-paid commercial work disappear, and it is his subscribers on Patreon that allow him to keep going.
“Since October 7, I've lost all that regular work. Everyone's ‘gone in a different direction’ – my emails are clogged up with people going in different directions … the voiceover work is completely gone, there's no commercial work, and there's definitely people that I would have collaborated with before that are not responding to emails,” he explains.
“I feel like I'm wandering further and further into a kind of a periphery, you know, that that the commercial world is not going to be able to kind of really accept So every regular stream of income is gone, but then Patreon has definitely plugged a gap, so I'm not going to starve at all.”
Now in his 40s, Hickey’s art and his activism have always been intertwined, and the two will continue to go hand in hand as he wrestles with how to fund a career that that most corporations would be loath to engage with.
“As long as we keep dividing ourselves, they're laughing at us, so I may not have a career anymore, but I have a purpose, and I'm really happy about it,” Hickey said.
“I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing, because people that I advocate for are telling me to.”
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