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Graham Norton's thinly disguised anger over Brexit

July 19th, 2019 3:39 PM

By Siobhan Cronin

Graham with festival director Eimear O'Herlihy. (Photo: Darragh Kane)

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IN a rarely sombre moment during his interview at the West Cork Literary Festival last night, author and BBC presenter Graham Norton only thinly disguised his anger about Brexit.

IN a rarely sombre moment during his interview at the West Cork Literary Festival last night, author and BBC presenter Graham Norton only thinly disguised his anger about Brexit.

‘It didn’t come from the right, or the left, it came from the stupid,’ he told a packed ballroom at the Maritime Hotel in Bantry, adding that he no longer quotes Boris Johnson on his show, because he doesn’t want to give that kind of thinking any legitimacy.

He agreed with his interviewer, Skibbereen journalist Nadine O’Regan, that US president Donald Trump gained traction initially, because so many people didn’t take him seriously.

And Norton noted there were one or two people in Ireland now, with very dangerous ideas, who should also be ignored.

‘My advice is, don’t retweet them,’ he said, advising the audience to ‘ignore them totally’, even if you are tempted because what they are saying or doing is so outrageous, because you are just giving them a wider audience, and some of those people might think that talk is acceptable, when it isn’t.

He received a round of applause for his comments.

But his political thoughts were just one very small part of a very wide-ranging and very entertaining interview that combined memories of growing up in West Cork, with his early career as an actor and comedian, to his hugely successful chat show, and onto his latest career as an award-winning author of two novels.

During the interview he revealed the two towns which his novels were loosely based in, and said that he could see himself retiring to West Cork, but never returning to Ireland to work. For full story, see next week’s Southern Star.

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