Baz Ashmawy opened up about his relationship with his father on the Tommy Tiernan show this weekend. The presenter appeared on the RTE show and revealed that his Dad left his Mum when he was eight years old.
His father, Mohammed Ussri Ismaill, split from his mother, living first in America and then moving back to Egypt, he explained.
Growing up without having his Dad around was hard, and he revealed that he often used to tell people that he had died; “I remember I used to lie to people and say he died.”
“There was a couple of different versions of how he died. It was easier to say he died than to say your dad left.”
“I adored him, I thought he was god, I thought he was great.”
However, he went on to say how fantastic his mother was growing up and that he was so “lucky” to have her.
When asked how she explained his absence Baz said; “I felt very sorry for her because how do you explain?”
“She was able to have the discipline to never bad mouth him, I don’t know how she did it.”
“And she said to me, ‘He does love you just in a different way. He’s just not able for certain things and when you’re older you can go sort that’.”
When he got older, he made the decision to move to Egypt to live with his father and stayed there for two years.
“I remember when I met him years later, I was maybe 15 or 16 I had moved to Egypt to spend some time with him to get to the answers and he just went, ‘I don’t want to talk about that right now’ and that was it.”
“There was no closure with it and then a couple of years later he passed away.”
Reflecting on it now the DIY SOS presenter said he thinks it was a topic that made his Dad uncomfortable, as it was too vulnerable;.
“It’s vulnerability, people aren’t able for it. They’re not able to say those things sometimes.”