I met my husband at a work event. We got talking in the pub afterwards and established who we knew in common (his ex-girlfriend, as it happened). This was in 2012 and so I missed out on a personal tour of Irish Tinder. Never mind, the view from the sidelines was grim enough.
I remember sitting in a pub beside my friend Joan as she pulled up the profile of a male acquaintance. In real life, Marc (not his real name) was a programmer whose hobbies were gaming and walking the delicate line between insult and flattery with women he met online. On Irish Tinder he’d listed “sports” (or maybe it was even “PE”?) as a pastime. His Tinder height was 5ft 10in, the universal metric of all men 5ft 7in and under. I knew Marc from coding meetups and because he’d messaged me on my 28th birthday to tell me I had “two good years left”. But I felt cruel sitting there, holding this pocket-sized version of his aspirational self in my hands. “Ireland is just too small for this,” I remember thinking.
In 2022, the hugely popular The 2 Johnnies Podcast revealed that one of the Johnnies had been catfished by an account named Cora O’Donovan. The profile felt legitimate. Selfies of the beautiful “Cora” were interspersed with pastoral scenes of rural Ireland, and he and the woman in question had a number of mutual acquaintances. He followed her and they soon began messaging.
She was like the ideal Rose of Tralee candidate, a tin whistle-playing GAA fan who worked as a visual merchandiser for River Island. On the morning they planned to finally meet in person, tragedy struck – Cora’s aunt died. Her Instagram and stories were awash with tributes.
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Suspicious now, Johnny “B” O’Brien took to perhaps the most Irish website of all – RIP.ie – and could find no mention of the unexpected demise of a 54-year-old woman reposing at home anywhere in Co Monaghan. Cora later invited him to Ryan’s on Camden Street and to her house share, but each time the elusive Cora had slipped her moorings. Friend Nicki, who claimed to be dating a mutual acquaintance in the GAA, was there instead to give excuses, cook full Irish breakfasts and offer lifts to the next county over.
This is real life and not a horror story, so it took a while before O’Brien discerned that Nicki and Cora were one and the same and that neither persona was real. He’d been catfished. When he told the story at a live gig in the 3Arena, it emerged that other Irish men, many in the GAA community, had also fallen for Cora’s wiles and similar accounts affiliated with her. The story re-emerged last week when it was revealed that the woman responsible for the GAA catfish scandal had reappeared under the alias Aoife Kennedy.
Why didn’t the men see the ruse? Maybe they didn’t want to. Or maybe, after years of enforced social distancing, they were inclined to believe that this was as real as it got.
Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together, argues that digital intimacy is a misnomer. Smartphones and social media spell disconnection, Turkle says. People today are less prepared to invest in their friendships or relationships. Instead, we look for tools that allow us to be close but separate at the same time; intimacy gets switched out for loose connections. We’d rather the illusion of togetherness without the demands of a real relationship.
One GAA player, whom the 2 Johnnies refer to only as “Paul”, believed he was in a four-year relationship with a profile called Emma McCarron, despite never having met the woman in question. “Emma” even had a photo of herself and Paul Photoshopped on her profile. Stranger again is that Paul used the same image on his own grid for a time, despite knowing it wasn’t real. Why? Perhaps now, when our relationships are mediated and our online selves are tweaked and tuned, it’s no longer a question of real vs fake as a spectrum of digital lies, from the socially acceptable to the intolerable. As far as Paul was concerned, he and Emma were really together and this picture, however it was made, was a testament to that reality.
There’s something arresting about seeing the words “catfish” and “GAA” strung together. Like, say, “the Blockchain Ceilí” or “the Big Turf Firewall”, the juxtaposition captures the weird intersection of rural and digital culture alive in contemporary Ireland.
The GAA was established in 1884 as a way for young people in rural areas to come together through sports and other community activities. For more than a century, it has been a part of how young people make friends and find love. But Johnny B, a former hurley-maker from Tipperary, says that he’s met most of his recent girlfriends on Instagram, so connecting with Cora didn’t feel strange. And unlike other catfish stories we might watch on Netflix, where extreme wealth or beauty are what suspends disbelief, Cora was credible because of a particularly Irish sense of placing people, even online. She felt like she could be from “around”. The next county over, maybe.
“In Ireland we like to ‘have’ people,” says Johnny “Smacks” McMahon. “When you meet someone new, you both ask each other a load of questions ... until you find a person in common and then you can say ‘ah! You’re so and so’s cousin from up the country. I have you now’ and the conversation can continue.” This is the primary basis for establishing trust in rural Irish communities.
In the GAA catfish saga, the way we know and trust others is coming apart, even as we try to grasp it.
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