DERMOT WHELAN What's your earliest holiday memory?Being on the Aran Islands when I was three and a hen knocked me down. But I got my own back by eating snack boxes for the past 10 years.
What was your worst holiday?When I was a student I spent a summer in Normandy working in a factory that made prostheses. My job was to check the hips and knees for specks of dirt and count bags of screws. But they had already been checked by someone else, making it the world's worst job. It was in a very depressing town which was like a thousand Ballymun flats.
What was your best holiday?My honeymoon to the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert was a fantastic week of complete and utter madness. I dressed as a cross between an astronaut and a wizard for most of it.
My wife is an artist and she’s into all that kind of stuff. We met lots of weird and wonderful people. It was definitely a pre-children kind of holiday.
If budget or work were not a restriction, what would be your dream holiday?If they invent an amusement park called Babysitterland, that would be my dream holiday. I'd go there and offload the children. They'd have seats for us to sit on and beds to lie on and that's all I'd like to do. Then we'd collect the kids at the end of the two weeks. When you have kids, a holiday isn't a holiday. I come back completely shattered and wonder why I am not rested, but it's because I've had no sleep and have not sat down for two weeks.
If you had your pick, who would you bring on holiday with you?I would bring my wife and kids . . . and a babysitter.
What's your favourite place in Ireland?I go to Lahinch, Co Clare, a lot. I love it there as I get to play golf and surf, and the kids go mad for the beach. My mother's house is there, so it's free.
Your recommended holiday reading?I can say what not to read on holidays. I decided on one trip to Spain to make it my mission to read Ulysses. It almost ruined my holiday. I got about 30 pages into it and my brain imploded. So I stopped reading it and bought three tabloid newspapers. It was a wonderful feeling and I was delighted to read about Kerry Katona's diet plan!
Where will you go to next?I'm trying to find a place that's hot but good with children. Every parent is talking about Princess Yaiza Resort in Lanzarote as the place to go. It's somewhere you get to sit down and read a book for a couple of hours.
- Comedian Dermot Whelan plays the Cat Laughs Festival, Kilkenny, on June 5th and 6th, and co-presents 98FM's Morning Crew.
- In conversation with Genevieve Carbery