Living as I do in London – a global melting-pot with 24-hour access to cheap thrills and expensive hummus – you might think it’d dilute my Irishness. If anything, it’s accentuated my Donegal rearing. On my daily commute through Victoria Station, weaving through the recalcitrant horde moving at the pace of the guy from the Mr Soft ad, I mutter “Move yersel’, ye hallions!”. Much as I appreciate the slick interconnectivity of the Tube, sometimes I think of the home country, where we have not so much integrated public transport as a fiendish set of riddles, and imagine what the Donegal Tube’s service announcements would be like: “The next station is Stranorlar. By the way Teresa, I saw your mother in town the last day and she’s lookin’ well. Tell her I was asking for her”.
But these are not things that are said or done in London. Neither is, for example, signing off a conversation with someone by saying “Good luck”. In the UK it apparently sounds ominous, like I know something about their journey home that they don’t. What we say and how we say it certainly causes a stir over here, the general reaction to the Irish accent and vocabulary a kind of baffled lust: people may not know why we call a can of Coke a “mineral”, but they sure like how it sounds.
Such things bring into sharp focus what an effortlessly distinctive (and confusingly sexy) people we are, and it was a desire to explore those distinctions that provided the inspiration for my current book, Do You Know Who’s Dead?. The title, of course, is a reference to Ireland’s unique preoccupation with community death updates, and the opening gambit habitually asked by Irish parents of their kin, just before “So you seeing anyone at the minute? What are ye hiding from me!”
Whereas my first book dealt with the painfully surreal-but-true world of Irish politics, this one casts a wider net, from mythology to sport, pop culture to creature comforts, in search of the nuggets of knowledge, the pearls of wisdom, the things that speak to the heart of the country and the people who call it home. Things like, oh, I dunno:
Tea and biscuits tell us a surprising amount about ourselves
It might seem frivolous to think you can figure out anything noteworthy based on tea and biscuits, but hear me out. What sums up our political system better than our two big brands of tea that people are weirdly, tribally loyal towards? What sums up the concept of an Irish solution To An Irish problem better than going off chocolate for Lent but allowing yourself a Yellow Snack because “it’s technically a biscuit”? What speaks to the Irish propensity for “Feck it, that’ll do” than buying somebody a box of USA biscuits for Christmas? It’s also worth noting the 1916 rebels chose Jacob’s Factory and St Stephen’s Green, mere feet away from Bewley’s Cafe, as places to besiege themselves. Thought went into that.
We have a Forrest Gump-esque ability to find ourselves in the middle of history and invention
“I have lived in important places, times when great events were decided,” wrote Patrick Kavanagh. Kavanagh didn’t live to see Daniel O’Donnell on Top Of The Pops in the same week The Shamen’s Ebeneezer Goode topped the charts, but I imagine that’s what he was getting at. Daniel mixing it with the Acieeed crew notwithstanding, we’ve long shaped the fate of the globe: Daniel O’Connell created the template for peaceful protest still studied today; and Parnell is responsible for the now-universal phenomenon of feckless backbenchers blindly following orders, by establishing the modern whip system. Politics aside, Co Down medic Dr Hans Sloane gave the world an altogether sweeter gift, discovering and successfully marketing hot chocolate while working in Jamaica. The drink, that is, not the band.
Our will to win is sporadic at best
Machiavelli once suggested it was preferable to be feared than loved. Ireland has never really bought into that, hence why the Italians beat us in the quarter-finals in 1990. Much as we’d hate to admit it, given the choice between being eternal Greatest Fans In The World or winning three consecutive World Cup trophies, we’d probably take the adoration. Our sporting diffidence is summed up by ’70s national team manager Liam Tuohy having to quit because being an ice cream salesman paid more. Would you want Roy Keane selling you a Freaky Foot?
On our day we could scalp anyone, it’s just that we’d often seem to prefer to put that day off till tomorrow. This trait manifests itself politically too: when negotiating the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921, having run rings round the British Empire to get there, the Irish delegation spent their time pelting each other with fruit and coal, and running up enormous tabs from Harrods buying bonbons and party streamers. Gloriously indecorous yes, but it’s all fun and games till somebody loses a province.
We embrace being different
For a people that regularly makes its mark out in the world – be it Saoirse Ronan, Oscar Wilde, Phil Lynott, or a guy in a Roscommon GAA jersey pictured in Uganda – we also enjoy indulging our esotericism. The whole country watched Friends, but we also had our own homegrown Ross and Rachel: Miley and Biddy Byrne. Mary Robinson inspired the globe, but at home the untranslatable Rose of Tralee kept a very peculiar brand of Irish-style feminism prominent on the calendar. And why bother with postcodes when we’re all telepathic anyway?
That the Northern Line brings out the Donegal in me is pretty consistent for us: the Irish will always be exactly who they are, no matter the backdrop. It’s a quality that endears us to the rest of the world, a fascination often shown through other countries’ classic TV programmes. What could be more of a tribute to us as a people than special Irish episodes of Magnum PI and Murder, She Wrote? No point asking Jessica Fletcher if she knows who’s dead...
Do You Know Who’s Dead? A Hilarious Celebration of What Makes Us Irish by Paddy Duffy is published by Hachette Ireland, £9.99
