Aoife Dunne
The popularity of media outings, podcasts and theatre shows that deal with death, crime and heartbreak suggests that Irish people love nothing more than wallowing in a good tragedy, which may be why Galway “comedian and poet” Aoife Dunne has come from nowhere to become the current undisputed Irish queen of ‘grief porn’.
Grief porn – or, as screenwriter and presenter Charlie Brooker dubbed it, “mourning sickness” – feeds into the cultural phenomenon where those who achieve success following a personal loss are lauded through a narrative of triumph over adversity.
Fuelled by what seems like a strong penchant for seeking attention, Dunne’s career has been forged around losing her mother when she was 23. Her stage show, Good Grief, is based around her life after this loss and she has also received great attention and praise for speaking about her experience of trolling, shame and going to a psychedelic retreat as part of her healing process.
It may be considered mawkish and distasteful in some quarters, but mining the difficulties and tragedies of one’s own life for material appears to be a good strategy for putting bums on seats without encountering, er, any further loss.
A dead giveaway around just how much of an appetite there is among the theatre-going public for this kind of material is that Dunne made her first stand-up comedy appearance in November 2023 and by April 2025 had put on her own show in the Olympia Theatre. She announced earlier this year that she was extending the 2026 run of her sold-out tour of Good Grief, with dates added in Manchester, Glasgow and London.
“Being funny is a reflex for me,” she told the Sunday Times Ireland. “I don’t want to sound smug but that part comes easy.”
Of course, anyone willing to bare their soul for content will be catnip to hacks and broadcasters. You only have to look at the Sindo magazine’s six-page cover story this month, rehashing the well-worn story of the death of Norah Casey’s husband in 2011, to see that. Similarly, Dunne’s story of unexpectedly losing her mum in 2010 has been trotted out ad nauseum on everything from The Tommy Tiernan Show on RTÉ to Síle Seoige’s podcast, Ready to be Real. Her willingness to share the details of her personal challenges has garnered her acres of column inches and numerous broadcast slots, which is useful when you have tickets to sell.
Dunne’s stage show also chronicles the bizarre situations she has found herself in on her journey through grief, from an affair with a runaway preacher from California, to a luggage mishap on the way to an ayahuasca retreat that led to her standing in a lingerie shop panic-buying underwear with a shaman.
In 2022, Dunne booked her “ayahuasca journey” in Brazil and has shared that experience through various podcasts and interviews. These retreats are a guided, multi-day immersive experience, where participants consume a psychoactive, plant-based brew under the supervision of a shaman or trained facilitator. The ceremony involves purging, intense hallucinogenic experiences and introspection, and is aimed at personal and spiritual growth and overcoming trauma. Dunne told the ST Ireland that the psychedelic retreat helped to heal the pain she had carried since her mother’s death.
While ayahuasca is controversial, the comedian informed listeners to Laura Dowling’s podcast that her life completely changed following the experience, which made her “unhook” herself from the fear she had carried all of her life.
From Kinvara in Galway, Dunne grew up as the daughter of two “mad hippies” and is a middle child of four children. “I always say that I didn’t know I was poor until I moved to Dublin in my 20s,” she told Galway Now. “Growing up, we were on welfare. I received welfare for school books and uniforms, but I genuinely didn’t know it for a long time.”
A former English teacher, Dunne has an arts degree and a master’s in human rights law. She did drama classes at Galway Youth Theatre when she was growing up – and regularly inserts that she studied with the very popular Bridgerton actress, Nicola Coughlan, into media interviews. As part of her ‘I’m mad, me’ schtick, she also did a course at a “storytelling school”, called The Mezrab, in Amsterdam for six months in 2024.
While she had originally hoped to become an actress like her bestie Coughlan, this ambition bit the dust when she went to London aged 19 with her local youth theatre because they had won a competition. She encountered other young aspiring actors there who were headed for prestigious drama schools such as Rada and Lamda, and realised that she came from a totally different background, which, she feared, would make being a successful actress harder.
Happily, she seems to be at peace with the colourful trajectory her life has followed. Dunne has described in interviews how her sister has an intellectual disability, her brother was born with cancer and she grew up as “quite a nervous child” into an “insecure adult”.
Still, the apparent insecurity doesn’t stop her from speaking out on Instagram, where she has almost 200,000 followers.
She told Seoige how she became the target of a “far-right online lynch mob” at Christmas when she called out an account that had a million followers. When the account owner shared what she said, it led to a “pile-on” in which she received “rape threats, death threats, and hundreds and hundreds of abusive messages”.
Dunne started a fundraising campaign on the Buy Me a Coffee platform to pay the legal bills accrued after her account was mass-reported and then restricted by Meta, which curtailed her ability to monetise her social media account.
Asking for support in her “fight against the far right” and to help her “rebuild and get grounded again”, she explained that she “couldn’t work, couldn’t post, and lost brand jobs I was relying on for the next few months”.
She said: “I went to the gardaí over threats and have everything recorded for my own safety. Trying to deal with all of this properly and safely has already cost me €2,500 in legal bills, which is a lot for anyone, but especially for me as a new, self-funded performing artist with no sponsorship or backing. It’s been a really heavy blow at the exact time my income has been disrupted.”
Proving that she may be down but not out, Dunne told Galway Now that her fame has accelerated so much that in one hour four people stopped her when she went for a coffee in Dublin, and she was stopped 20 times in one day for a photo at last year’s Beyond the Pale festival. “My friends were asking, ‘So, are you famous now?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, I don’t know, I think so’,” she said.
If it all goes belly up, Dunne says that she would love to write for TV and, naturally, thinks that Good Grief could make a good TV show. She also thinks “there’s a book in me” and her ability to attract attention would be dead handy as a selling point.
It is surely only a matter of time before a savvy publisher comes along to capitalise on the brand of grief porn that Dunne has now honed into a fine art, which is quite possibly her end game.
