‘We’re all a little bit cracked’ Bressie says
Niall Breslin brought his live ‘Where Is My Mind’ podcast tour to his home town on Sunday night. The mental health activist, author and frontman of The Blizzards spoke to Conor Moore, aka Conor Sketches, about his rise to fame doing impressions of sporting heroes, in front of a packed audience at Mullingar Arts Centre.
The first half of the show was dedicated to Bressie’s own mental health journey, which began, he said, at 13 years of age. His family had uprooted from their Mullingar home to move to Israel, where his dad Enda was on a UN peacekeeping mission.
He told of his first night there, in a strange country, hearing the sirens whaling, warning of a missile attack, and being told by a woman speaking in broken English to go to an underground bunker for safety.
That was the instigator for a series of panic attacks which plagued the former rugby star through adolescence and into adulthood.
His anxiety caused him to retire from the Leinster rugby squad, affected his music career with The Blizzards, and saw him knocking on the door of an NHS mental health clinic in the middle of the night in London, where he was working as a songwriter for a company that managed the likes of the Spice Girls.
The catalyst to seeking help was when he suffered a panic attack on live television during his time as judge on The Voice.
Bressie has since acquired a masters in mindfulness, is now doing his PhD on the subject, and embarked on a mission to improve the way we talk about mental health in Ireland.
He has co-founded the A Lust for Life schools programme, helping young people in schools, and written a series of children’s books, the latest of which, ‘Follow My Lead', encourages children, and their parents, to incorporate mindfulness practice into daily life.
Through spoken word, music, and a lot of humour, Niall talked about heavy subjects with honesty and reassured the audience, that “we’re all a little bit cracked”. But in the words of Leonard Cohen, that’s how the lights gets in.
The second half revolved largely around Conor Moore, who regaled the audience with hilarious tales involving Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Tommy Tiernan, and Roy Keane. Bessie quizzed him on his work ethic and process, while both agreed that there was nowhere like home.
Conor, who said he had been lucky to live in many beautiful cities, has decided to build a new home in Tudenham, where his family are from.
Ultimately, he said, home was where he could be himself, where people wished him well.