Some of the things that make us uniquely Irish

Date Published: 02-Jan-2013

Sometimes you have to go away to truly understand what it means to be Irish – perhaps it’s the longing for home that draws the ex-pat to Irish pubs or centres that, in all fairness, they wouldn’t cross the road to visit if they were still at home.

They will also go online to order boxes of Tayto cheese and onion crisps, when they’d probably be eating Walker’s if they hadn’t left.

And they’ll get up at five in the morning if they’re in the US or stay up until the early hours if they’re in Australia to see the hurling on the telly, when they mightn’t actually know how to find their way to Croke Park with a map if they were still at home.

But that shouldn’t be knocked because sometimes you have to lose something to know what you’re missing – but it got the mind thinking about the things that define us.

We’re not talking about red hair or John Hinde postcards or about economic failure or drinking pints of Guinness – it’s the slight more subtle characteristics or guilty pleasures that bring a warm glow no matter how far you are from home.

So in no particular order, here’s the drinking pints after Mass on a Sunday; eating crisp sandwiches; watching the Late Late Show, stopping in your tracks for the Angelus on the telly; and eating breakfast rolls where what normally goes on a big plate can mysteriously be crammed into a small baguette.

We’re the only nationality in the world that sees brown envelopes as a symbol of corruption – everywhere else they’re a symbol of bills.

We’ve made a national past-time from giving out about the rain for eleven months of the year – and about the sunshine are three days of it in July.

Nobody does sunburn like the Irish – back of the neck, lower arms – for that scarlet red/milky white combination that looks like an Arsenal shirt reversed in the wash.

There are sports fans who insist on bringing flasks of tea and loaves of ham sandwiches with them on the train or to Croke Park, despite the reality that both already boast enough food to feed an army.

We’re the only people on God’s earth, happy eating cold pig’s crubeens while playing 25 in a community centre. And an Irish fry is not a fry without black and white pudding.

We enjoy funerals more than weddings; because we don’t have to bring a present, we can sit where we like and with who we want to, and we have no idea if it will last an hour or a week.

We spent ten years proudly boasting about how much our homes were theoretically worth – and now we just want to make them as close to worthless as possible to avoid paying the property tax.

We love the English Premiership but support anyone at all who plays against the English team.

We buy English newspapers, watch English television, ape English music and culture – and cry into our pints late at night about 800 years of English oppression.

We reject every Referendum once for pure pig-iron and then we ratify it quietly the second time around.

We buy bottles of water, despite the fact that we’re drowning in a sea of it.

Eternal pessimists that we are, we clap when our plane lands on the runway – as though the issue was clouded in some doubt – and, as we exit, we always thank the bus driver for giving us a lift in return for nothing more than our fare.

With the obvious exception of Roy Keane, we’ve mastered the old adage that, in sport, it’s not winning that’s important, it’s the taking part.

Thus we celebrate our award for being the best fans in Europe for jumping into every fountain we set eyes on where we wrap ourselves in wet tricolours emblazoned with the name of our local pub, as we sing that old Irish anthem Olé Olé Olé until we’re hoarse.

And after all that, we will turn out in our thousands and hold giant homecomings for teams that have no trophy.

We’d have a festival – or, come to think of it, a state-funded inquiry – at the drop of a hat, for anything you can think of.

On the festival front, we annually capture and crown a goat as the King at Puck Fair, we turn a fifth generation Irish/American into the Rose of Tralee, and we mark the feast day of our patron saint by trying to drown ourselves in a sea of green beer.

And then at the end of it all, no matter how big the crisis, how awful the trauma, how impossible the dream – we have the cure-all to solve every problem.

Because there is nothing that can’t be made more palatable with just a nice cup of tea.

For more from Dave O’Connell, see this week’s Connacht Tribune.