Graham Linehan
Television writer and gender-critical campaigner
Dublin-born creator of Father Ted and The IT Crowd, Graham Linehan is one of Ireland's most celebrated comedy writers — and, since around 2018, one of its most polarising public voices. His decision to speak out against gender ideology cost him his career and much else besides, making his story a pointed case study for a country now having the same arguments he was cancelled for raising.
Graham Linehan grew up in Dublin and built one of the most celebrated careers in British-Irish television comedy, co-creating Father Ted with Arthur Mathews and writing The IT Crowd. For Irish audiences, his name long carried a particular warmth — the man who gave the world priests on Craggy Island and the basement dwellers of Reynholm Industries was unmistakably one of their own.
From around 2018, Linehan began publicly questioning gender identity ideology, first on Twitter and then across a growing range of platforms. The professional and personal consequences were swift and severe: television work dried up, long-standing industry friendships ended, his marriage broke down, and he was eventually banned from Twitter. In "Graham Linehan Lost Everything for Saying 'They're Hurting Kids'" (episode #34, Beyond Gender, September 2025), he sits with Stella O'Malley to trace those eight years — from his first public statements to the present — with candour about the cost of dissent and why he believes it was worth paying.
For Irish listeners, the conversation carries specific weight. Ireland has its own reckoning underway: debates in secondary schools over gender self-identification policies, questions in the Oireachtas about puberty blockers and youth safeguarding, and a health system still forming its clinical response. Linehan is not a clinician, but as a Dublin-born cultural figure his stance is harder for Irish institutions to frame as a foreign controversy.
He now writes regularly on his Substack, Glinner Update, tracking legal and political developments across Ireland and Britain. His Beyond Gender appearance is among the series' most personally candid — asking Irish audiences to sit with an uncomfortable question: what does it mean when someone is proved, at least in part, right about something that cost them everything?
