14 things only the Irish love
From our obsession with Garth Brooks to our undimmed love for 'Reeling in the Years', there are some things that only we Irish love.
Will Hanafin
Published 09/07/2014|13:23
- Share
This week's Garth Brooks pandemonium is only proof of how much the Irish love (or perhaps loved) the man himself.
- Share
The devastation following the announcement that all five concerts are to be scrapped illustrates something really important about us. If Irish people get passionate about something, that passion spreads faster than one of those terrifying global viruses that kicks off when an incontinent Chinese bat sneezes and ends up laying low half the world's population.
But forget about the Ebola virus, when we get worked up, we develop the WeLoveYou! virus real bad. From going crazy about cowboy-hat-clad crooners, to embracing the latest New Age fads like hugging Indian women, to love-bombing astronauts or devoting ourselves to watery tinned peas, we Irish just love to love inexplicable things!
Garth Brooks
He's overweight, hangs around Croker an awful lot and we liked him a bit in the 1990s, when he told us tomorrow would never come. But enough about Bertie Ahern, it's that other blast from the past, Garth Brooks, above right, whom we love to love this year.
We've been through so much hardship in the last six recession-hit years we really couldn't be blamed if we decided to elevate Richie Kavanagh or even Dickie Rock to godlike status. Garth Brooks coming out of retirement is like discovering some old flame on Facebook after 20 years, noticing they still have most of their hair and teeth, and thinking . . . why not?
It harks back to a simpler time, when high-waisted jeans and singing Friends in Low Places wasn't frowned upon.
Of course, Garth Brooks isn't this little island's only inexplicable passion . . .
Canadian spacemen
Astronaut, Commander Chris Hadfield probably took photos of every country in the world several times over when he was up in the International Space Station. But, because he spoke a few words of Irish and threw up a few photos of Ireland by
night on Twitter, we've practically adopted the poor fella. It was as if Junior Tourism Minister, Michael Ring, was dispatched to the steppes of Kazakhstan with a big net after he landed back on Earth, because Hadfield ended up in an Irish tourism promotion video shortly after landing.
When any foreigner shows us a bit of love, we turn into Liam Neeson's character in Taken and threaten to find them . . . and overexpose them.
Lowest-common- denominator comedy
Lowest-common-denominator comedies are like Fianna Fail - just when we think we have weaned ourselves off them, we keep going back for more.
Usually, they're male jokers dressed in inappropriate clothing; the comedians, that is, not the Fianna Fail leaders. We had our own version of Eurovision winner, Conchita Wurst, back in the Seventies, when we thought it was acceptable for a grown man in a beard to dress up like a schoolboy. Despite the dire jokes, we lapped up Brendan Grace's Bottler routine.
When we eventually figured out that the hairy-schoolboy thing was getting too weird, we gravitated towards cool, self-aware 1990s comedians like Dylan Moran and Tommy Tiernan instead. Then we experimented with the direness that was Killinaskully and Mattie, but thought better of regressing back to lowest-common-denominator stuff.
But LCD comedy was an itch that we needed to scratch again and, when Brendan O'Carroll's Mrs Brown appeared and willingly filled that long-established slot (cue hilarious canned laughter), we signed up immediately. To paraphrase the old joke, we're the nation that walks into the bar and asks for a double entendre, and we're regularly given one!
'Home and Away'
Also, inexplicably, we like some real soap operas. You know something strange is going on when you see an advert for the visit of a Home and Away hunk to somewhere like Mantra nightclub in Maynooth.
But actor, Steve Peacocke, who plays Brax in the show, found it profitable enough to traipse around the Irish nightclub circuit last year and returned to Maynooth this month. For many Irish people, 6.30pm weekdays can only mean Brax o'clock, when they get their latest hit of antipodean suds 'n' surf. Home and Away was surely responsible for the upsurge here in vest-wearing, the popularity of Maori-style tattoos and the upward inflection at the end of sentences - you know? - even before we all had to emigrate to Australia.
No wonder it's popular in Ireland. With so many Irish people in Australia, there's a small chance that young Johnny Murphy from up the road will turn up in Summer Bay in an upcoming episode, wearing a vest and inflecting like crazy.
And, if you spot him, the picture quality will definitely be better than if you have to Skype him.
New-Age gurus
If New Age practitioners want to hit the big time here, they need a unique selling point.
There are more New Age gurus in Ireland than you could shake a dreamcatcher at, but only the elite get to sell out the RDS, appear on chat shows or top the best-seller charts.
A guru can't just roll up and chant "hom-hom-hom" and expect to get the numbers. They need to label themselves a hugging guru or a tickling guru, or at least be accompanied by a complete family of angels over their left shoulder to pique our interest.
But, when they've got our confidence, we're completely suckered. Why else would we queue in our droves to be hugged in a steely embrace by a matronly woman? That's easily achievable in Copper Face Jacks for much less effort.
Chaste Irish beauty pageants
We were up in arms last year when the merest whiff of a child beauty pageant was mooted for Ireland. We took our usual "down with that sort of thing" approach, saw off those weirdos who like to dress up their children, and then settled down to enjoy another year of the Rose of Tralee.
Of course, the rules of the Rose competition state that you have to be female, between 18 and 28, and must not be married or ever have been married.
There has also been a scrap in recent years about removing the ban on mothers from entering the competition.
Our campaigning political types spend the year giving out about American direct investment in Ireland, US troops using Shannon airport and Donald Trump buying golf courses, but we immediately push these to one side to watch some seventh-generation Irish girl called Sally Anne, from Georgia, dance a jig for Daithi in Tralee!
Melancholy folkies
The arrivals area at Dublin Airport must resemble the auditions queue for that recent Cohen Brothers movie, Inside Llewyn Davis. We've resuscitated so many musical careers, Ireland is like a country-sized adrenalin shot for fading and obscure artists.
We've a particular fondness for artists that sing songs that sound like they were written just for us - as if some aspiring songster in Seattle actually penned his moany dirge for Mary in Mullingar, who just broke up with her butcher boyfriend, Kevin. David Gray, below, and his barnstorming success with the White Ladder album is the Normandy landing for folkies - a tale of derring-do never to be repeated. David's chart-busting hit single, Babylon, sold 100,000 copies here, was number one for six weeks, and White Ladder remains our biggest-selling album ever.
Female folkies have also embedded themselves in the national consciousness, like Tracy Chapman and Sandi Thom with their earwormy standards like Fast Car and I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker. The iconic status of honorary Irish folkies is only confirmed if they get a residency in the INEC in Killarney and you just can't get their bloody song lyrics out of your head.
Beloved telly repeats
In most countries, people would give out if certain programmes were repeated ad nauseam on the telly. But some programmes on Irish TV appear more often than Seamus Heaney did on this year's Leaving Cert English papers, and we still love them.
When Reeling in the Years is on, we all just stick the popcorn on, get into comfy jimjams and experience some national Groundhog Day nostalgia fest.
It could be the lack of an annoying narrator, or the deftly chosen soundtrack, that makes Reeling in the Years stand out from the crowd.
But, mainly, it has to be our desperate search for a year, or an era, more miserable than our own, where we can safely say once more, "They had it terrible back then!"
Whenever income is dipping in Montrose, all that RTE programmers have to do is reach for the tape box that says "Reeling in the Years - break glass in case of emergency" and start the series again.
Then it's just a case of sitting back and watching it climb to the top 10 on the Nielsen ratings chart.
Country and Western singers from . . . the Uk
We need our own version of the Statue of Liberty for misunderstood and forgotten UK C&W singers with this poem underneath.
"Give me your tired voices, your poor singers, your sluggish record and ticket sales yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your back catalogue/Send these, the hopeless, record contractless, to me:/I lift my lamp beside the golden door."
We've long been a soft touch, I mean, appreciative audience, for plaintive balladeers. Wrexham's most famous cowboy, Charlie Landsborough, couldn't believe his luck when he hit pay dirt in Ireland after a star turn on Kenny Live in the early 1990s.
Even though we already had our own home-grown straggly-haired, bearded man who liked to ask weird questions, in the form of John Waters, we still embraced Charlie singing What Colour is the Wind?
Nowadays, Nathan Carter has taken up Charlie's spangly mantle in these parts. Little did we know that things had gotten so bad in this little recession-ravaged country that the only thing that roused us was a young Scouser singing Wagon Wheel.
Imported saints and buried statues
French people have been known to knot onions together and tie them to bicycles, and Germans dress in lederhosen and guzzle beer. If you think that's bad, remember we like to bury extravagantly clad baby Jesuses in the ground to ensure good weather.
On the morning of a wedding, it's probably better to pop to theshops and buy a few umbrellas instead of wandering off down the lawn and burying some statuary, like the Child of Prague, above.
We've got plenty of Irish saints, like St Patrick, but they're like every Irish mammy's overindulged kids; they're never expected to do anything useful around the house. St Patrick is an excuse for a drinking fest and we never bother to pray to him for anything. As usual, we rely on the foreign imports to do the heavy lifting. Whenever anything is lost, it's St Anthony of Padua who's relied upon to track it down like some celestial sniffer dog. We also have lots of relics here, like Oliver Plunkett's head in Drogheda, but the One Direction treatment was reserved for the appearance of the Relics of St Therese of Lisieux back in 2001. I'm just surprised we didn't try to bury poor Therese when she was here. Imagine the amount of fine wedding days that would have created.
The FAI
The FAI is not so much an Irish sporting organisation as the world’s longest-running soap opera. Their headquarters in Abbotstown even sounds like a soap opera setting akin to Carrigstown or Summer Bay. The football results are irrelevant at this stage. What’s important are the cast members you recruit for the soap.
They need to have buckets of character flaws or it’s just no fun. Steve Staunton lost games all round him, but his main problem was that he was just too boring and one dimensional. That’s why we recruited Trapattoni — a cross between a pope and a Mafia don.
The fact that he didn’t speak English was genius, so the FAI soap opera producers were able to introduce a foil for him in the form of Manuela, his translator. It was a dysfunctional Italian version of Ronnie Barker and David Jason in Open All Hours.
The FAI were obviously nervous when they recruited Martin O’Neill. He’s a bit serious and wears glasses, and there’s a real risk he may win some matches. That’s why we had to introduce his demented younger brother, Roy, who might just go crazy at any minute. Now it’s compulsive viewing again and abnormality has been restored! Phew!
Unsexy food
The Food Nazis envisage us all popping down to outdoor markets every weekend to stock up on olives and feta, some overpriced stone-ground bread that needs a chainsaw to cut and some of that fudge they inexplicably sell.
The list of the top ten most popular Irish food brands makes for more prosaic reading, unfortunately. We still solidly refuse to buy food that isn't processed, plain or tinned. White bread and black pudding are among the top sellers, along with items such as sausages and tinned peas. Digestive biscuits and milk also rank high in this very unsexy menu. It's probably part of our inherent stubbornness that we prefer peas soaked in green liquid straight from a tin rather than the real thing, or a chewy blood sausage for brekkie rather than some no-sugar muesli. All washed down with a glass of milk and a digestive, of course.
The GAA
We should really hate the GAA. Everyone works for nothing, except for the suits in headquarters busy signing those Sky deals, fronted by Rachel Wyse. Meanwhile players are required to run like eejits for the glory of the parish/town/county.
Nowadays, inter-county players have to buff themselves up to Ronaldo standard, but their financial rewards are Ronald McDonald standard. Players could be playing in Croke Park for 10 years and earn nothing, while Garth Brooks is there for five days and sells 400,000 tickets worth more than €20m.
But when it comes down to club level, the GAA lures us back in.
The camaraderie, the training sessions, and the sense of pride when your team finally wins something: it gets to you.
And they have those damn cute nurseries, where they allow the nation's six-year-olds to wallop the hell out of each other with real sticks. What could be better for you or them?
Rogues
Living in Ireland is like being in the audience of a bad panto, where the only one you can really identify with is the baddie. This is because the rest of the cast are so bloody annoying. Enda Kenny was made for one of those grating panto roles, which entails dressing in tights and crushed velvet, having a severe side parting, and being unbearably inept and goody-goody.
We particularly use elections to make sure that our percentage rogue count is kept up with a spattering of rural caricatures and "colourful" businesspeople usually getting the nod. Call it a rogue management programme if you like. We have them where we can see them and, if our rogues go too rogue between elections, we can always vote them out next time.
Sunday Indo Life Magazine
A new way to join the conversation
We have updated our commenting system to LiveFyre, which means you will now need to register with us in order to comment. Once you do, you can enjoy great features like linking your comments to your social media pages and more.
Register now below, it’s quick and easy.
Comments that are judged to be defamatory, abusive or in bad taste are not acceptable and contributors who consistently fall below certain criteria will be permanently blacklisted. Comments must be concise and to the point. The moderator will not enter into debate with individual contributors and the moderator’s decision is final. The comment facility is removed after 48 hours.