Culture, is it? Reviewing Terry Eagleton's latest book, Crazy John and the Bishop and Other Essays on Irish Culture, Proinsias O Drisceoil says that one entire essay is populated by various neurotic stereotypes including spiritually mutilated women, emotionally autistic men and Dublin advertising executives permanently fearful of returning to a life "unemployed and sexually guilt-ridden at the country crossroads".

Good man, Terry. It's time it was said. I run into the same crowd myself all the time and there is no denying they are one sorry lot. On the outside they look harmless enough, but you wouldn't believe the weight of sexual guilt and emotional angst they carry about, and damned depressing it is having to listen to them when you are only trying to have a quiet pint or two at the end of a long day.

I blame the expanding army of counsellors. They have a lot to answer for.

In an attack on fashionable revisionism, Terry also tells us that "the British can now confidently rely on the Irish themselves to produce the kind of anti-Irish sentiments which they had previously to disseminate themselves".

High time, too. We have been dependent on others, particularly the Brits, for long enough. Our advertising executives, when they are not cowering in atavistic fear of the unemployed, guilt-ridden country-crossroads fate, are doing sterling work in this area. A new campaign being run in Britain for Murphy's Stout, for example, has replaced the five-year-old "I'm not bitter" slogan with the new line, "Drink to the sisters of Murphy", illustrated by a trio of leather-clad dancers.

The British magazine Marketing has completely misunderstood this new approach. "There is a strong possibility", it sneers, "that Irish heritage. . .is becoming as tired as a flagging Riverdancer."

God help their innocence. The Brits should be aware that once the initial Riverdance euphoria had passed, and the first few millions and millionaires were made, and the time had clearly come (though clearly not to the Brits) to begin slagging off Riverdance and Michael Flatley and everything and everyone associated with it and him, the Irish were way ahead of the posse.

As for the leather-clad dancers, it is a piteous state of affairs when a marketing magazine of supposedly high standing cannot recognise post-modernist irony when the thing is literally dancing in front of it.

However, you can hardly blame the crowd over beyond for not seeing that "the sisters of Murphy" is a play on the Sisters of Mercy, carrying all kinds of implications and associations for guilt-ridden convent-educated sexually repressed ex-Catholic ex-Pioneer expatriate Irish stout-drinkers in England.

This is even before you take account of the same crowd's treasured hoard of nostalgic adolescent memories of the pained warblings of Leonard Cohen, Bard of the Bedsitter in 1960s Dublin. That was the lad who found other aspects of the Sisters of Mercy to celebrate in his time.

But these are the customers Murphy's Stout is clearly and cleverly aimed at, and more power to them.

On a more worrying note, Marketing has reported that "table sauces are coming under increasing pressure in the UK as traditional meat-and-two-veg-style meals are on the wane." HP Foods is looking for a new advertising agent for two of its most familiar sauces, Lea and Perrins and HP. Its major rival, Heinz, is already planning a revamp of its globally famous tomato ketchup.

If they think it's bad over there, in terms of cultural change, they should try procuring a "traditional" dinner in Ireland these days. The turkey-and-ham Christmas fare is about all that is left of the old days and ways and you will look a right eejit in front of your Celtic Tiger friends if you simply slap up a good well-cooked leg of lamb with carrots and parsnips and a feed of boiled Kerr's Pinks for your dinner party.

Your only hope is that your guests will be so jaggedly sophisticated as to presume you are deliberately serving up "retro-food" (all the rage it seems), and if so, you and your dinner will paradoxically be a big hit. Start with prawn cocktail and finish with sherry trifle and you might pull the whole thing off spectacularly.

Still, if you really want to get the lie of the land, go over to Patrick Guilbaud's in the Merrion Hotel and when the silver dome is lifted from your dinner, demand a bottle of YR sauce, and stand your ground.