Following the perfection of your commentary at home and having built up your confidence in the pub with a virtuoso display of memory, you can apply to go public on the terraces. The following traditional comments will allow you to make a convincing impression on your fellow fans. Say the following authentic GAA phrases to whoever you find yourself beside at the match:
‘It’s coming into the busy time of the year as everyone knows.’
‘There was huge disappointment when our side lost.’
‘We lost because the other team were better on the day.’
‘We didn’t match our expectations on the day.’
‘It was a hard winter because winters are hard.’
‘Training was tough because training is very tough.’
‘The commitment of our team is always one hundred and ten per cent.’
‘It’s going to be a great campaign because we have a great group of lads with big hearts [not a symptom of coronary disease].’
‘Tipperary people are hurling people.’
‘Kilkenny people are hurling people.’
‘People who don’t hurl don’t know what they are talking about.’
‘I am always disappointed when something doesn’t happen, unless it is something that I am happy happened, like winning against the run of play.’
‘I am delighted but all credit has to go to the group of fantastic lads.’
‘From a personal point of view it won’t affect me.’
‘There is a hunger there [nothing to do with crowds at the chip van].’
The Rules of Interviewing Stars
To secure your reputation as a die-hard GAA supporter, you should interview your favourite player after the match for your local parish newspaper or blog. Stick with the obvious questions and ask nothing tricky. Here are a few standard questions that will get the ball rolling (punning is usually mandatory).
Q: Will playing with a broken arm and leg and a burst spleen have any effect on your game in next Saturday’s semi-final?
A: No, it won’t, because it is always an honour to play with this group of lads. They all give one hundred and ten per cent. I am disappointed when I can’t give one hundred and ten per cent but I’ll be giving it one hundred per cent with the arm and leg I have left. What is a spleen used for anyway?
Q: When ye went twenty-six goals and forty-three points down in the first twenty minutes, did that upset your game plan to pull off the draw?
A: No, no, not really. They had the breeze behind them. It’s all part of the game. I knew we would get a fair bit of stick at half-time, but we fought back valiantly. They were the better team on the day. Never mind your games. It’s the replays that count.
Q: Losing twenty-two years in a row must have undermined your confidence?
A: Not at all. It only made me more determined to give one hundred and ten per cent.
How to Become a Referee
If you are super uncool, you might qualify to be a referee. If you want to be considered for refereeing, you should fail an eye test and send written confirmation of this condition to GAA headquarters in Croke Park. Next, you should turn up for interview sporting a pair of jam-jar glasses. Usefully, the GAA publishes a list of attributes that will make you a good referee. You should have a thorough knowledge of the rules. As these are changed every season, knowing them is a life-long commitment. But while refereeing a match, to keep the fans happy you should ironically display no familiarity with whatever rules are current. You should be physically and mentally fit, which will allow you to escape the stampeding crowd by having the wit to run towards an exit, as soon as the match is over. You should deal courteously with players and officials. For example, as you run towards the exit ask the goalie can he please remind you where you parked your car. You should have the ability to remain calm when hiding in a locker in the dressing room. You should operate strictly in accordance with the principles of justice and fair play, which means that you should not bring charges against the fathers of the under-ten side who ran amok. Similarly, you should have the moral courage to take decisions which are correct, which means don’t bring charges against the mothers either. You should be able to live with unfair criticism and threats against your life. You should be able to accept constructive criticism, such as on the marital status of your mother or the sums your sister is charging for her affections. You should retain a good learning graph, which I think is a type of hairstyle. You should be alert and decisive on the field, which means knowing exactly when to escape. You should enjoy refereeing, which means not dealing with the other major issues in your life that have driven you to it. You should be committed to the protection of players and the prevention of abusive or violent conduct. This means that you should supply your own security arrangements. You should be a good communicator on and off the field. A characteristic that separates great referees from the herd is their reluctance to go toe-to-toe with the crowd in an abuse-hurling competition. You should behave with dignity both on and off the field, which is helped by the use of disguises when off the field. Above all things else, you must retain integrity, consistency and uniformity. I assume that this is what you wear on the pitch.
* * *
As you put on more and more weight, you will find yourself slipping out of your cool circles. You may have even fallen into a relationship with someone on the Northside who actually makes money from doing something with their hands. Soon you will only see your old cool friends from the car on your way to the MacDonald’s drive thru on the Naas Road. Imagine you once ate at Rick’s Burgers on Dame St. When obese and totally uncool, you will be spotted at a Dickie Rock concert in the Red Cow Hotel, where you went to meet newly discovered relations from Cork who were afraid to drive to your house in Cabra.
When you are no longer cool because you have been away from the Dublin 8 scene for too long, you will end up in The Big Tree pub wearing a Meath County football jersey.
Glossary
Dáil The Irish parliament
ESB Electricity Supply Board
Fianna Fáil Centrist political party
Fine Gael Centre-right to centrist political party; currently the largest political party in Ireland
GAA Gaelic Athletic Association
Garda/Guard A member of An Garda Síochána
An Garda Síochána The Irish police force
TD Teachta Dála, which is Irish for a member of parliament
Notes
1 The autobiography of Peig Sayers, who lived on the Great Blasket Island in the first half of the twentieth century. Don’t worry, it’s not the last you’ll hear of her in this book…
2 I don’t know the origins of this practice, but I assume it had something to do with leaving the kitchen table free for grub at the wake. There is the related tale of the auld lad who is lying on his death-bed when he smells something delicious cooking downstairs in the kitchen. ‘Is that ham?’ he asks his wife, licking his lips. ‘It is,’ she confirms. ‘But you can’t have any. It’s for your wake.’
3 Rob describes himself as Anglo-Irish because he is Irish on his mother’s side and Anglo on his father’s. There is an entirely separate set of rules on how to be Anglo-Irish. Historically, the Anglo-Irish tended to follow the rules of how to be English in matters of culture, science, law, religion and politics. Many became senior army or naval officers in the British Empire because they were also following the rules of how to be Irish in matters of drinking, fighting and consequently dying suddenly.
4 Rob argues that, technically, as an Anglo-Irish person, he is not a blow-in but has always lived here through his historical consciousness. I deal with this argument by the traditional practice of politely ignoring it.
5 When you learn how to survive an experience with an Irish builder (see Chapter 7), you will discover that a sparks is an electrician.
6 A chippie is a carpenter when referring to a person (without reference to gender) who works with wood. A chippie is also English slang for the Irish slang te
rm ‘hoor’, which is used when referring to an Irish prostitute or a woman you don’t particularly admire. But hoor can also be used as a term of admiration for a successful Irish man, as in the phrase ‘That cute hoor got away with it again’, where the term ‘cute’ is used to describe his mental cunning and not his physical appearance. To avoid confusion, you should never use the term cute with reference to a prostitute. When you are an expert in these slang terms, you can say, ‘That cute hoor was out with that hoor again last night’ and everyone will know what you mean.
7 This energy supposedly runs underground in straight lines. Important archaeological monuments were built on the junctions because our ancestors were ‘in tune’ with them. Traditionally, the ESB run their power lines over ground, which makes them easier to see than their occult counterparts underground.
Don’t expect me to explain what these ancient power lines are because I am not a blow-in. Blow-ins have actually written books about these energy lines and some of them don’t even involve drugs. If you know what these blow-ins are talking about, you are obviously a blow-in yourself. Otherwise, just go along with it.
8 The pasteurisation of raw milk was introduced to control contagious bacterial diseases including bovine tuberculosis. Historically, TB used to be the infection of choice amongst our poets and artists but has since fallen out of fashion as a fatal disease. Apparently TB cheese tastes better than its pasteurised cousin and is definitely more exciting to eat. While raw milk products, such as TB cheese, are only legal in Ireland, they are regarded as a health food in many European countries from where the blow-ins originate. For many blow-ins, there is no better way to express their unmediated existential relationship with nature than to make TB cheese. Without their efforts, we would have only the inoffensive varieties.
9 Most anthropologists rather lazily accept the view that the origins of the incest taboo lies in pre-historic observation that incest produces deformed off-spring. I don’t believe this because it is obvious that cavemen had no knowledge of genetics. Instead, I think it owes its origins to the fact that there would be less presents at incestuous marriage ceremonies.
10 Trinity College Dublin of course (see Chapter 10).
11 I don’t know what you are supposed to do with the pineapple.
12 TWW stands for the Two Weeks’ Wait. It takes two weeks to confirm whether or not the egg implant has worked.
13 Prescriptions for methadone.
14 Hiberno-English – past tense of to shit.
15 These are millimetres. Some people use centimetres, but that seems less scientific to me.
16 Opes is slang for openings, which is the term builders use instead of holes, which is what they actually are.
17 The time it takes to actually get home from the office lunch doesn’t count, but you might add the eight minutes it takes to get your eyes to focus on the crumpled letter to Santa, plus the one hour and eleven minutes it takes to find the letter in the inside pocket of your jacket that you left on the back of the seat in the pub, which you have to go back for and subsequently stay for just one more.
18 Saturnalia coincides with the mid-winter solstice festival marking the shortest day of the year. Some historians trace the origins of Christmas to this but anthropologists know that Christmas Day is actually the longest day of the year.
19 Pablo Cruise is not his real name. I am following the long-standing anthropological practice of changing the names of informants. This is sometimes done to preserve anonymity, sometimes for security and sometimes just out of habit. My candidate is our neighbourhood authority on alt-rock, indie rock and contemporary country music, so I thought it fitting to use the name of an obscure eighties band.
20 To preserve Pablo’s identity, perhaps I should say that maybe it’s not Dublin Central.
21 Or maybe it’s not. Am I taking this too far?
22 This anonymity tactic isn’t working, is it?
23 This was the name that the campaign gave to a flyer detailing Pablo’s (political) achievements to date.
24 In the 1930s the prominent Irish politician Eoin O’Duffy was so taken with fascism that, when he became leader of the Army Comrades Association, he changed their name to the National Guard and adopted many of cutting-edge fascist behaviours that were fashionable across Europe at that time. Amongst others, these included the Roman salute and a sartorial obsession with shirt wearing. In Germany, the preferred shirt colour was brown, while in England and Italy it was black. O’Duffy, making a fashion statement of his own, made his followers wear blue. They quickly became known as the Blueshirts. In 1933, Cumann na nGaedheal, the Centre Party and the National Guard (aka the Blueshirts) merged to form Fine Gael under the leadership of O’Duffy. I am not saying that they were a fascist organisation but everyone else seemed to think so. By the 1970s, Blueshirt had become the nickname for Fine Gael.
25 Hang is Hiberno-English for ham. Hang is probably the most popular sandwich filling, followed closely by hang and cheese, stuffed chicken, banana and egg salad. While many sandwich bars have sprung up all over the country, using a wide variety of fancy brown and white breads and a myriad of fillings, the authentic traditional Irish sandwich is hang on white sliced bread, preferably flattened in tin foil because you have kept it in your arse pocket. Unlike me on this occasion, you shouldn’t go far from home without a hang sandwich, because sharing them is an important Irish social ritual.
26 It is vital that you pronounce this name correctly – ‘Bow-No’.
27 Do not explain to your parents that the difference between college fees and registration fees is about five thousand euro. There is no need for your parents to know who does and who doesn’t have to pay fees. As far as they are concerned, you do pay fees. Anyway, it’s not stealing. They had you – you didn’t ask to be born.
28 Most Irish engineering students really want to be architects or designers, and everyone knows that Apple is the best platform for graphics. That is why the iPhone is the preferred smart phone of engineers.
29 In case you are uncool, BYO means bring your own bottle of wine.
About the Book
From the quintessential Irish Mammy to a love of all things GAA, the Irish have traits that make us different from our neighbours.
In this often hilarious guide, David Slattery takes us through the rules of being Irish, from how to approach an Irish wedding or funeral to the Irish attitude to health, business, politics, death, Christmas and being cool.
For his research, David canvassed undercover for a major political party, attended opportune weddings and funerals, and interviewed doctors, psychiatrists and builders: ‘I have begged, spied, knocked down my house, got a job and drank in many pubs – all in the interest of science.’
An interesting and amusing look at our national quirks and idiosyncrasies, How to Be Irish should also prove invaluable to the tourist or foreigner who wants to blend in without a fuss.
David Slattery is a social anthropologist. His previous anthropological writing embraces a wide range of contemporary topics, from zombie culture to public transport.
How to Be Irish Page 22