NIALL HORAN MADE an appearance on The Tommy Tiernan Show last night, where he talked about his upbringing, career, and grief after his former bandmate’s death in an extensive interview.

The 32-year-old singer sat down with the comedian on the RTÉ talk show, the premise of which is a surprise reveal of the guests to Tiernan.

Speaking about his upbringing in Mullingar, Horan said, “We didn’t have loads, but we didn’t need it either.”

He was raised in a housing estate, he said, and his dad worked in Tesco while the singer was growing up. His parents separated when he was four or five years old and he spent the weeks with his mother and the weekends with his father.

On the weekends, he and his brother and father would head over to England to watch Derby County play.

“He’d bring us across, you know, whatever money they had was spent at Darby County and to this day is still the same,” Horan said. “He’s over there every other week.”

It was in primary school that one of his teachers spotted his musical talent and he was given various solos in carol services over his time in school. Prompted by Tiernan, Horan sang a few lines of Away in a Manger.

“God, you do have a lovely voice,” Tiernan, who seemed to have limited knowledge of Horan’s career, said after.

In fourth or fifth class, he played Oliver in the school’s musical Oliver, based on the Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist, but as he went into secondary school he “started to get lost a little bit”.

“I mean, I’m not the biggest lad of all time, and I was very small then. I was one of the fellas that if you gave me a ball, I’d look like I knew what I was doing with it – don’t put someone near me though,” Horan said.

“I was a bit of a coward in that sense, I didn’t fit in that way.”

He was encouraged in music in school by another teacher, and it was when he was 16 that X-Factor began auditions in Ireland for the first time. He auditioned, got through the initial rounds, and eventually was handpicked by Simon Cowell alongside four other boys to become a boyband.

“Then that was basically it. I barely came home after that.”

After the X-Factor, Horan and his band, One Direction, took off, and Horan spoke about the packs of fans and stadium tours that surrounded him for the next five years of his life.

Asked about how experiencing earning lumps of money from the band felt, Horan recalled his first big pay cheque from a merchandising deal when he was a teenager.

“Looking at it, and, I’ve seen that figure before, maybe on the telly or something.”

“Could you tell me how much it was for?” Tiernan asked.

“Well, it was, y’know, 500 grand.”

The band initially experienced a knock when member Zayn Malik left in 2015, but continued on as a foursome until they announced they would be taking a break from January 2016. The band never reunited and all members pursued solo careers.

Horan was only 22 when the band split. “I think there’s a fine line there of fear and excitement of what’s next,” he said. “I was excited about the prospect of making an album… but it was also a fear of, like, 22, this could be it.”

It wasn’t it: Horan’s now promoting his upcoming fourth album, and has enjoyed considerable success internationally, playing sold-out arenas and achieving a number of hits.

The mood turned sombre then when Tiernan asked about Liam Payne, a former One Direction member who fell to his death from the third floor of a hotel in Buenos Aires in October 2024. 

Horan said he was still processing his death and had yet to come fully to terms with it. Two weeks before he had been in Buenos Aires on tour, and he and Payne had met up in Horan’s hotel room for coffee. That night, Payne attended Horan’s show and paid his dressing room a visit beforehand.

Horan left Buenos Aires to continue with the tour and had only returned home on its conclusion when he received a text telling him that Payne had died.

“I was just in pure shock, and I knew he’d had a couple of issues, but because I wasn’t around him like I was in previous years, all the time, I didn’t realise to what extent or anything like that.

“I knew there was some stuff going on but I wasn’t aware of the depth. And then you go through the stages of grief that I probably haven’t touched the sides on yet. You know, I grew up with this fella, and all of a sudden it’s no more.”

He continued, “It’s such a strange thing you go through. Like, what could I have done if I’d known more? Should I have dug more into it?”

He said he had “stupidly” turned on the TV and flicked through news channels reporting the news. “I found it – because I was in the pictures with him on Sky News – I found that very weird,” he said. “And also just kept thinking about his little son and things like that.”

Horan, a huge golf fan, now owns a golf management company that he also runs alongside his music career. He said he’s at a stage in his life that “things are just in a nice little spot”.

Asked as a final question whether coming home and seeing people from before the fame is a complicated thing, Horan said no.

“I think I’d be very lucky to feel that the town has a sense of pride over me and nearly an ownership over men you know – ah, that’s a great feeling. I just love that, love that town, the people in it, the characters.

“It’s the kind of place you leave and then you just slot back into, like this country in general to be honest. You travel all over this place and it just feels like one big pat on the back.

“I love that I’m the little Irish fella in the music industry. I love waving the flag.”