Religion

You’ll still find cars parked outside country churches on Sunday morning, but the Catholic Church is finished. Everything from The Murphy Report to a priest in Kerry queuing up with the bogmen to shake the hand of convicted sex offender in court has seen to that.

So where should you go now for a hit of spirituality? A number of Irish people have been tempted to gospel services because it looks like fun.  You’ll have seen them on a documentary, giving it Hallelujah with immaculately dressed Nigerian families on a Sunday morning, sticking out like a sore thumb that seems to be dancing to the Birdie Song.

You don’t want to be one of them. Africans look good praising the Lord because they are comfortable with public displays of emotion; agony or ecstasy, it’s all the one. We reckon this should suit us because we like to think of ourselves as Latin souls with freckles. In reality, we are straight-forward Nordic types who need a table full of pints before we let ourselves go.

The only time you see us praise the Lord with gusto is at midnight mass, where we’d prime ourselves with a few hot whiskies before belting out ‘Joy to the World, the Lord Is Come’ as if it were ‘Ole Ole Ole’.

Sober mass is an entirely different affair, where we mutter “I believe in one God” down at our shoes and give each other the sign of piece with an apologetic hand shake. Sorry for touching you in public.

The dreariness of the Catholic mass was perfect in a country whose national motto should be “Jesus. I hope nobody is looking at me.” Now that it’s pretty much gone, the people of Ireland are left with two choices. If you are a man, you will believe in nothing. If you are a woman, you will believe almost anything.

Because of satellite TV, the modern Irish man spends a lot of time watching documentaries about either monkeys or Nazis. On the basis of this, he has concluded that we are just chimps in shoes. Therefore, particularly in male company, an Irish man should proclaim himself an atheist. Otherwise the other men will just laugh at you and ask did you not see that show on Discovery where the monkey drove a motorbike and showed signs of empathy.

The beauty of this new found atheism is that you are free to replace religion in your life with the only thing you really believe in. Sport. In place of entry into heaven, you should aim to play five-a-side until you are 45 and then train an underage team at your local GAA, soccer or rugby club. Everyone else is doing it. Instead of handing out the collection basket at mass, you can now play your part in the community by imagining you are Alex Ferguson while shouting at the Under 10s on a Sunday morning. What’s not to like? If you want a truly spiritual experience, then go to Croke Park.

And remember, the only sacred thing left in an Irish man’s life is that the GAA should remain an amateur organisation. Any attempt to change that is sacrilege. Even inter-county stars who make millions for the GAA and nothing for themselves have to pretend this is the case.

It’s different if you are a woman.  In place of chimps and Nazis, you watch Ghost Whisperer and Desperate Housewives. You’ve had it with organised religion, but your sixth sense tells you to still believe in ghosts, fate and superstitions. It’s why you wave at magpies.

It’s also why most Irish women now believe in angels. In case you just popped in from 1998, ‘the angels’ are the new religion of choice for Irish women. Most now believe they have a guardian angel, a kind of Santa Claus with wings who exists to look after them and help them get anything from a new man to a Mini Cooper. Apparently if that doesn’t work you can appeal to something called the Universe, a Supreme Court of wishful thinking.

Angels are the perfect spiritual product for Ireland in recession. For a start they are free.

There is no collection plate to fix the roof of the church or buy Fr Gerry a new Toyota or pay compensation to the victims of clerical abuse.

The angels are also available 24/7, in your mind, so you don’t have to get up on a freezing Sunday morning and go to mass. While they are dedicated to putting the wrongs of the world to right, they never seem to judge. This is brilliant because when you think about it, there is nothing good about being judged. It also ties in beautifully with our new found sense of victimhood, where we’re all paying for the boom years even though none of us seemed to benefit from it.

The only drawback with the angels is when you start talking to a man about them, he will think you are bonkers. He’s probably seen a documentary on National Geographic about them and knows its all rubbish. So if you have asked your guardian angel for a bit of romance from the new guy in accounts or an engagement ring, the last thing you should do is tell the man in question or he will run away muttering something about needing to train the under 14s and you will never see him again.

Gay Ireland

When Cork hurling goalkeeper, Donal Og Cusack told his family he was gay, his father responded, “but you don’t have a square jaw; we’ll get you fixed.” The country laughed its head off when this emerged in Cusack’s book last year. We pitied the poor man for being so out of touch.

The real voice of modern Ireland could be heard in the reaction of Cusack’s team mate, Ben O’Connor.  “If there are 30 of us out there, there is surely one fella among us who is gay, and if Ogie is gay I don’t give a f**k.”

Not to suggest that O’Connor didn’t mean what he said, but if you want to avoid looking as out of touch as Cusack’s dad, it’s vital these days to stress that you couldn’t give a f**k about someone’s sexuality.

The standard response of straight Irish people down the years – I don’t care what they get up to in private as long they don’t try it on with me – is no longer enough. In fact, that’s homophobic these days. We’re so tolerant in Ireland now that you should be delighted to have a gay man try it on with you.

We’re so embarrassed by our backward attitudes in the past, that we over compensate in stressing how cool we’re with it now. There are a couple of rules around this. When referring to well known homosexuals such as Graham Norton or David Norris, never ever mention their sexuality, because what’s that got to do with anything? Remember, we don’t give a f**k.

It is crucial that you surround yourself with gay people. If you don’t have a gay friend already, then get at least one as soon as you can (unless of course you are gay, in which case prepare for a lot of straight people asking you around for dinner). That way you can pepper sentences with “my gay friend” references, which is very now.

All the better if you can manage to uncover homosexuality in your family. They don’t need to be gay, a suspicion will do nicely. “I’m sure my brother is gay. Obviously, I don’t give a f**k. I’m behind him all the way.”  Don’t snigger when you say this.

If the younger generations are anything to go by, Ireland is about to become extremely camp.  A lot of the young shop assistants in places like Topshop, Gap and H&M make Gok Wan look like Paul O’Connell. In one of those shops in Cork the other day, I saw a guy mincing so quickly it was like he was on wheels.

Whatever you do, don’t try and ingratiate yourself with these teens in a trendy uncle way by camping it up yourself. One of them is bound to say “that’s so gay”, which is a compliment when they say it to each other but an insult when they say it to you.

One more thing. Hold back on getting a lesbian friend as a social accessory for a couple of years. We’re still not there when it comes to accepting that Mna na hEireann could be turned on by Mna na hEireann. In fact, we’re probably back around Donal Og’s father on that one. But that will change. Or get fixed.

Love and Marriage

34% of Irish births in the first quarter of 2009 were outside of marriage. Now that men believe in sport and women believe in angels, that figure is likely to increase.

That doesn’t mean the end of weddings. They’re no longer under pressure to do the ‘decent thing’, but Irish drinking society still insists that unmarried couples give their friends ‘a big day out’. This is what marriage is about now.

The big day out was easy in the boom years. You put on a slightly better wedding than your friend did the year before (“oh, we’re having champagne at ours, sure we have cava every Friday nigh!”) and in return you got cash gifts of €250 per couple, €150 for a loner. As long as the bridesmaids didn’t go nuts on their facials, manicures, pedicures, all over body wax and false tan you came close enough to break even.

All that has changed.  A lot of guests will have lost jobs, taken pay cuts, seen the value of their home decrease. Nobody knows how much money to give any more.

A good wedding host should let people know through the ‘Gift-Guru’. Every family and group of friends has one. She (it’s always a woman) is acknowledged as the person who knows the right amount of money to hand over in wedding, christening and confirmation situations. Never mind that the whole thing is a mystery, everybody will consult her to find out what they should cough up. So, if you’re getting married, just tell her the price list: €75 for unemployed couple, €150 for single income couple, €250 if both are still working and if anybody gives a donation to charity in place of a present, I’ll mention their name in the speech and not in a good way.

But what if the Gift-Guru is unsure? How much should you give then?  Whatever you do don’t slip a cheque into a card saying “Lowered the present to 200, allowing for deflation and likelihood you got a great deal from the hotel. Have a good one, Tony and Lisa, xx”. This applies even if you are an accountant.

Likewise, don’t be one of those eejits who decides to give €300 to help make up the likely shortfall caused by people who gave less because they were unemployed or accountants. When word of your ‘generosity’ gets out (and it will), fellow guests will just bitch about you rubbing their noses in it and you’ll be forced to listen to “ooh, no recession here” for the next six months. No good deed goes unpunished.

The only winner here is somebody who has recently lost a job. No matter how much you give, the married couple will protest that they didn’t expect anything from you in the current circumstances. So give them nothing. They can’t say a word.

The Irish Language

Things are looking grim for the Irish language. Gaelscoileanna thrived during the boom because middle-class people were willing to pay so that Fiachra, Oisin and Caoimhe wouldn’t have to mix with Wayne and Cheryl in their local primary school. They probably can’t pay now.  TG4 was heavily subsidised so that people in the Gaeltacht could watch documentaries about island people, Ros na Run and Lipstick Jungle. That funding is bound to come under pressure.

So, does the recession would mean curtains for Gaeilge? No. There has never been a better time to speak Irish in this country. Why? Immigration.

It used be that we most of us only ever spoke Irish when we were abroad, usually to take the piss out of a local waiter. In the new multi-cultural Ireland we’re driven demented from listening to groups of Poles, Chinese, Germans and Nigerians talking and laughing in their own language. We reckon they’re talking about us. Wouldn’t it be great if we had a language of our own?

Suddenly people who haven’t spoken Irish since the leaving cert oral exam find themselves saying to a friend “Feach ar an fear as Poland. Nach bhfuil se go halainn? Is maith liom sleep leis him.” The friend replies “ar aghaidh leat” and they’re surprised to discover they can speak Irish after all.

This underground revival is happening all over the country. If you don’t brush up on your Irish, you could quickly end up feeling left out as your friends natter among themselves. It doesn’t matter that they are only saying things like “look at Sean”, “where is Rusty?” and “I like my green bike”. You’re still going to think they’re talking about you, particularly if you’re called Sean or Rusty.

It isn’t just the native Irish who are speaking the language. An Angolan taxi-driver told me the other day how delighted he is to hear his young daughter using the Irish she learned at school. Recent arrivals don’t have Peig-induced hatred for the Irish language. Unlike the depressed post boom locals, they still love Ireland and all things Irish.  It’s only a matter of time before Ros na Run gets a Chinese bartender with a Connemara accent.

So enjoy Irish as a secret language while you can, because soon the whole country will be speaking it. And you might find that the “fear as Poland” will turn to you and say “ar aghaidh leat” himself. Jesus, the mortification.

Careers?

What’s the story with careers in post=boom Ireland?

A job in the bank (it didn’t matter what kind of job) used be at the summit of respectability in Ireland but of course it’s now slid down somewhere below traffic-warden and prostitute.

Keep away from farming. The rest of the country is slowly beginning to realise that not all of the tens of billions lost on property disappeared down a hole. A lot of it went to farmers. Even if you didn’t benefit yourself, you’ll still have to do the old farmer trick of wearing shite stained slacks with no arse to make it look like you don’t have a bob. You might even have to sell your Range Rover.

Teaching was always a good bet, but the rest of the country has somehow decided that teachers are to blame for the current debacle and you don’t want everybody hating you. Worst of all your moody teenage pupils will probably hate you even more than they hate themselves.

Steer well away from any career that you couldn’t explain to your grandmother. It’s all about straight forward jobs these days. If you tell people that you’re a Social Networking New Media Life Coach, they’ll just assume you’re unemployed. It won’t be long before they’re right.

The law is a recession-proof option. You make a fortune doing the paperwork during the boom as all the deals are done, and then you make another fortune on the way down as cranky business partners sue the arse off each other. On top of that, you get access to the best gossip in town.

Finally, don’t despair. It might be a competitive job market, and you might have no obvious talents, but as long as you’re willing to act clownish and slutty on TV, you could always go for the job of being famous for being famous. Just don’t try and explain it to your grandmother.

Post-recession Ireland is a minefield for those who aren’t familiar with the new rules. Here are the things you need to know if you are to avoid every Irish person’s greatest nightmare; public embarrassment.

Don’t mention the war

The very mention of the word Bulgaria can bring mayhem to the dinner table. Your friend Maria will weep uncontrollably as her husband Dave explains she won’t talk to him since discovering the three apartments he bought during Mick’s stag party in Sofia are now worth eight Lev.

The fact is that everybody around the table will have their own property horror story. But that’s not the only reason to avoid all things real estate. Every group also has its own David-McWilliams-In-Residence; a smartass who rented her way through the boom and is now eating through her cheek in an attempt not to scream “I hate to say I told you so”, which couldn’t be further from the truth.  Just like Smug Dave, she will cut loose eventually and ruin the night for the majority of you who are trying to drown out your negative equity with a couple of pints with your friends.

If you must talk about property, then for God’s sake don’t say anything bad about a tenant. The tenant is the new superstar class in Ireland. For most landlords the only thing standing between them and the poor house are the remarkable people who pay enough rent every month to help with 10% of the mortgage. The landlord class is reduced to quivering wrecks at the notion that their tenants might break it off with them. Say something vaguely negative about your tenant and you could find a whole restaurant looking at you as if you just said “last night, I had sex with my dog.”

The early-bird question

To early-bird or not early-bird when it comes to choosing a restaurant on a night out? It depends. €25 per person for a four course meal is tempting, even if coffee is counted as a course. There is every chance that at least one person in your group is broke and dreading the cost of a full-price night out, which somehow always comes out at €70 a head plus tip unless somebody goes onto page two of the wine list.

But this is Ireland. To avail of the early bird you will meet at half five for a quick one, which means a rapid two, so everybody drinks slightly more wine then normal over dinner, because momentum is the devil when it comes to the booze. You’re foolish with the drink by half seven as you vacate your table for people who are willing to pay full price. Orla’s boyfriend can’t stand up and you’re off to the pub with at least 4 hours of drinking time left. Do the math. The early bird is a brilliant idea on a Tuesday night or if you want to leave more time for sex, but it’s false economy if you’re using it as a launch pad for a night of hectic gargling.

Tales of the Recession

It is de rigueur these days to place a ban on all discussion of the recession over dinner. This is driven by the mistaken notion that people are ‘here to enjoy themselves’, when in fact the only reason people step outside the door these days is to hear stories of people worse off than themselves. Don’t worry about it though, because once people get on to their third drink, they’ll avoid the story-ban and the air will be blue with people talking about the fella with the helicopter that now drives a taxi.

You need to out-recession every one else with the best car-crash tale of the night. Nobody will push you for names (in you are the person in the car-crash), so feel free to make it up. “My brother knows this guy who re-mortgaged his house to buy a yacht and two apartments in the south of France and now he’s about to lose his job in the bank and his wife, no stranger to boob jobs and shopping trips to New York herself, told him the other day that she’s going to leave him for some teacher guy she met down in Lidl. It makes you think”. This story should work with any crowd.

But be prepared, because this is bound to finally open up our national wound; who is to blame for the recession? As we know the answer to that is “somebody else.” If you want to have a harmonious evening, the key is to identify some group not represented around the table (bankers work a treat here) and then agree that those bastards are to blame for the entire thing. If you are at a bankers work do, then blame Brian Cowen. If you are at a bankers work do with Brian Cowen, seriously, you need to start hanging around with a different crowd.

The Supermarket issue

Put a group of people together these days and they’ll end up talking about supermarkets. We might be helpless when it comes to property prices and unemployment but our choice of shop remains one of the areas where we still feel in control of our destiny. People are passionate about supermarkets these days in a way they weren’t before, so if you’re going into company, make sure you know where you stand.

A good start is to make it clear you know the price of a litre of milk in three local supermarkets and mention that you learned this while reading your shopping receipt; studying your receipt is very now.  Remember, thrift is the new black so you need to be able to rattle off the numbers of how much you saved by switching to Lidl/buying own brand/using loyalty cards/shoplifting/whatever worked for you.

Be careful not to overdo the Scroogery though.  Anybody can cancel their health insurance and start buying own brand beans at the supermarket but then you spend four days on a trolley in a hospital corridor being treated for cheap-bean fever. You don’t want to be the price of everything, value of nothing guy.

You will definitely need a firm view on the shopping in the north question. If you are travelling through more than three counties to save money on your grocery shop, then cut it out. People who travel from deepest Munster to fill their boots in Newry are kidding themselves. Who really needs 8kg of onions? How much stuff do they throw out after over-shopping?

These long-range shoppers never add in the price of petrol. When forced to do this, they usually respond “I was going to be in Newry anyway’. Sorry now, but nobody with sort a life is ever ‘going to be in Newry anyway’. They’re travelling up there especially to buy an amount of jacks paper for the family that they couldn’t use up in a lifetime even if they had four arses each. To top it all off,  they arrive home wrecked ten hours later unconsoled by the fact that they need a second fridge just to cope with the amazing value they got in yoghurt. Don’t become one of these people.

Remember also to forgive your old supermarket. Just because you have saved yourself a fortune by switching to a cheaper place doesn’t mean you have to buy absolutely everything there. Ok, you still feel cheated by your old supermarket and are in the first flush of love with the new one, but life is too short for cheap toilet paper and toothpaste that reminds you of lucky-bag bubblegum. You should stay friends with your ex in a supermarket sense, and return there now and again to buy shaving cream that doesn’t give you a rash. People will respect you for it.

Haggling

You need a good haggling story these days if you’re going to make an impression. A lot of people see themselves as the new Michael O’Leary if they get 10% off a sofa. “So I said to the guy, there’s a recession on, now get real! I didn’t realise I was so good at negotiating – I might start my own business.”

Really? You’re the first person to open your wallet in that shop for four days; the guy would have offered to cut your grass, mind your kids and clean your gutters for life as long as you took something off his hands. At just 10% off, he’s rolling around on one of his fake Persian rugs, laughing his ass off at ‘the new Michael O’Leary’.

You’re nobody in the haggling stakes these days unless the salesman follows you out into the car park after you called him an out-of-touch arsehole for only offering a 70% discount. When he starts to tell you how his youngest daughter had to sell one of her ponies, you should twist the knife and ask him to throw in a rug. Remember that bankers, politicians and furniture retailers caused this recession. It had nothing to do with you. You have every right to be angry.

Buying a Car

This is a tricky business. Even though you can now get one for a carton of cigarettes, there is the danger that arriving to work in a flashy motor these days will put two words into your colleague’s minds; drug dealer. If HR get wind of this they’ll either fire you or try and buy drugs off you. It’s a career stopper either way

Outside the work place, driving around in a new car is just an invitation to road-rage from people who will assume you are the blame for the recession. There is only one solution to all this; disguise yourself as an old person.

Old people are the only category in this country that definitely did not cause the current crisis. While the rest of us are forced back into sackcloth for our sins, the elderly (who built this country, don’t you know) are allowed to carry on spending regardless.

They have two things that make them virtually untouchable; oodles of spare time and free travel. As Brian Lenihan’s attempts to wrestle the medical card from them showed, fired-up oldies can mobilise on the streets faster than you can say “I didn’t need a new set of false teeth, but when you can get them for free, why not?”

So if you are going to flash the cash, make sure the first thing you buy is a pensioner disguise-kit which should include one of those handy tartan shopping bags on wheels.

Can I afford to be a foodie?

During the boom years, there were two ways of proving your middle-class credentials in Ireland. The first was to study hard at college, build a career and constantly deny yourself gratification while obsessing about getting your kids into private school. The alternative was to buy an organic chicken. Talk about a no brainer.

With money tighter a lot of people are wondering if they can afford to be that ethical. The supermarkets have spotted this and free-range/organic chickens are reduced in price to the point of being suspiciously cheap. Does free range now mean that the chickens are allowed to move from their own crap for one hour every day and stand in the crap of the bird next to them?

The other issue is Farmers’ Markets. Yes they’re worth a visit to get your hands on fresh Irish produce. The problem at these markets is the twenty-something trustifarian in the knitted hat with the cupcake stall who is obviously just there to chat up yummy mummies in the hope they might give him three euro for one of his eight cakes. That kind of fluff was fine during the boom, but now it’s impossible not to yell “get a proper shagging job” at Godfrey and that will only make you look crazy in front of his hippy friends who will then rip you off at their turnip stall. So be careful. You could always have some fun with Godfrey though by haggling with him over his three euro cupcakes.

Holidays

As discussed earlier, this is a minefield. Unless you feel comfortable asking somebody how much money they have left in the bank, under no circumstances should you ask them what they are doing for holiday.

People who went to the Seychelles last year will reply that you can’t beat a week in Brittas and everybody will look at their shoes with embarrassment. Other people who went to the Seychelles last year will reply that this year they are going to the Maldives and you’ll only drive yourself crazy wondering where they got the money from.

If somebody asks where you are going yourself, then you should answer Spain.  That way they can assume you’re crawling back to unflashy Benidorm for €3 jugs of happy hour sangria followed by chicken and chips down the Dog and Duck. This might be true.  Or maybe you’re popping down to the villa in Marbella for a month, what recession, says you. Because let’s face it, you didn’t cause it so why should you suffer?

Sex

Do you remember Rashers Tierney? Rashers was the incredibly poor guy in Strumpet City, the drama set in Dublin during the 1913 lockout, who had a small army of chisellers because as he put it himself, sex was the one thing that the working man could enjoy for free in ‘deeze difficult times’. With so many other forms of leisure now out of financial reach, we’ve started giving each other the glad eye again as the Rashers Tierney in all of us figures out the best form of tax-free fun when it comes to bang for your buck.

Don’t do it. Chisellers were a nice little earner back during the boom years, when a generous children’s allowance would cover things like pony lessons and still leave a bit over to cover the mortgage. However, despite the fact that the government is bound to claw back a lot of the allowance in the next few years the modern chiseller will still want to carry on spending like nothing has changed. They’re a bit like the public service that way.

If you do feel the urge for some lovin’, then try and stick to cybersex and talking dirty to each other for the next couple of years. If you must have sex, make sure to use at least three forms of contraception. Because when it comes to cost of the modern chiseller, even Rashers would say Jaysus love, no tanks.

Fire the Cleaner?

Can you really afford the pleasant Lithuanian girl who comes every Wednesday with her friend who doesn’t have any English to give your house the once over? You spend an hour every Tuesday night cleaning the house anyway so they won’t think you’re a slob. Would it hurt to continue on and finish the job yourself?

If you share the house with somebody else, it probably would. The Lithuanian girl isn’t a cleaner; she’s a conflict resolution expert. For €13 an hour she and her friend set an independent benchmark for how clean the house should be, meaning that you and your housemate/spouse/boyfriend don’t have to fall out over the state of the tiles in the bathroom. When it’s clean enough for Lithuanian Cleaner Lady, then it’s clean enough.

If you still think that €13 an hour is too high a price to avoid yet another “why do you want me to polish the back of the wardrobe” argument, then it might be worth your while to figure out the cost of a divorce.

The inferiority complex makes Cork react with: “In your face, Dublin. As for Galway, Limerick and Waterford – in your faces too. In your face Kilkenny, ye don’t even have an airport. Kerry, what good is your All Ireland when your so-called cities are unloved? So, in your face Killarney and Tralee. While we’re at it, in your face Paris, Berlin and New York – ye didn’t even make the top 10 ye shower of langers. And by the way, in your face Dublin again in case ye missed it the first time.”

At this point Cork’s inner Roy Keane takes over and the superiority complex gets a run out. “How do you mean we’re only third? How come Abu Dhabi and Charleston were named above Cork when they don’t have an English Market or a Shandon or a Fota Wildlife Park or a river Lee or a gay goalie? Somebody start singing ‘The Banks ..” there quick.”

Lonely Planet’s bronze medal will cause outrage on Leeside. The hurlers will immediately go out on strike in protest, bringing the footballers out with them. A task force of Ronan O’Gara, Maeve Higgins, Keano, George Hook, Dearbhla O’Rourke, Graham Norton and Minister Michael Martin will be convened to make sure that the most beautiful city in the world will never again have to come behind a place in the desert that sounds like a kebab shop on Shandon Street or an American city that was named after a stupid dance from the 1920s. De indignity of it like!

Wipe that look off your face; people doubted that a two horse town in the Nevada dessert would ever make it as a tourist resort and look at it now. Richard Quirke, the real life Dr Quirkey, has shown a touch of genius by proposing to put a replica of the White House in his ambitious development. We’re so busy trying to figure out the thinking behind this that nobody has time to wonder who in their right mind would take a trip along the M8 for a night of sin in a massive casino attached to a 500 room hotel, greyhound stadium and concert arena to match the O2.

Time could change all that. Imagine watching local stars like Chris De Burgh, Brian Kennedy and Johnny Logan seven times in a row, matinee and evening shows, does it get any better? Then stumble out onto the strip – avoiding all the Irish journalists stumbling around on acid hoping to write Fear and Loathing in Two-Mile Borris – and head off for a night on the slots followed by greyhounds at dawn. Give us a few free drinks on the blackjack tables and, with the new blood alcohol level, people wouldn’t be able to drive home for days. It could well work; a truly Irish take on Vegas.

Which brings us back to sin. Las Vegas has a reputation in the United States as the place where every vice is permitted, so it’s crucial that what happens in Borris stays in Borris. Once this thing takes off, you can head for Tipp and leave your inhibitions behind at Horse and Jockey.

And while we’re at it, can we put this whole tripe and drisheen thing behind us. If this is authentic Cork food, then how come the city isn’t full of tripe and drisheen joints, with queues out the door at tea time?

The fact is that when it comes to food, Corkonians only really get passionate when asked ‘where’s your favourite chipper?’ We’re not talking about the McDonalds, Burger Kings or Abrakebabras of the world here. They are fleeting places, forever trying out brand new Mexican, Italian or American type things that all taste like breast in a bun with extra mayonnaise. We’re talking old-style chippers here, where the menu hasn’t changed since they invented coleslaw.

You know the drill. In burgers we have double-cheese, quarter pounder, chicken, breast in a bun, Hawaiian, batter and salad. Nobody in their right mind orders a salad burger. There’s cod in batter, sausage in batter, snack-box, snack-box in batter, mushy peas, cheese and potato pies. There are chips of course, with and without curry. There are two types of people in Cork; those who like their curry (or mushy peas) poured over the top and those who want it in a little carton, so they can pour it on top when they get home.  If you are sent out with an order for curry in a carton, and foolishly return home with curry on top, you’ll be called an asshole and sent back down to the chipper.

For many people on the southside, that chipper will be Jackie Lennox’s on Barrack Street. My wife’s family don’t talk about getting chips for tea, they talk about getting Lennox’s. If you go when it’s busy the queue will be somewhere out around Bishopstown. Don’t worry, it moves quickly. By the time you get to Glasheen the ‘who’s next?’ will be directed at you. Just step out of line and recite your order. There’s no need to shout, these guys have extra sensory powers of some sort that enable them to understand your need for a snack box. The whole affair never takes more than 10 minutes.

That’s just me; other people will have their own favourites across the south side. A friend of mine loves a plate of scampi with mushy peas from the Golden Fry in Ballinlough, but scampi can seem a bit posh weather for you average chipper fan, and there’s talk they also serve monkfish. Well, excuse me.  KC’s in Douglas is the closest thing we have to a gourmet chipper in the city, where the usual fare is dressed up with exotic sauces and pitta bread. Of course the Douglas crowd couldn’t just have an ordinary chipper like the rest of us, oh no.

Dino’s is more traditional, with a few popular shops across the city including my local in Turners Cross.  Dino caused a stir though when he put up a sign saying they had to stop giving out free scoops of chips due to too many requests; a lot of Cork diners regard the no scoop policy as chip shop sacrilege.

I don’t know much about chippers on the north side. However more than one norrie chip-connoisseur has told me that it’s insulting to ask for a free scoop up on the hills because it’s given to everyone as a matter of course. The same experts agree that their favourite place on the north side is Murphy’s on Gerald Griffin Street, with Tasty Snacks in Churchfield a close second. Somebody pointed out that Donnelly’s on Shandon Street is great after a few pints, which of course raises the important point that a place that’s good for your tea isn’t necessarily right after pints and vice versa.  Burger Hut on Hollyhill is famous for huge bags of chips. Finally, my mother-in-law mourned the passing of Con Callaghan’s near the North Cathedral, which is now a Chinese.

This brings us to the Chinese restaurant on Prince’s Street that is regarded by some Corkonians as the best chipper in town. Most of the traffic on the Grand Parade and South Mall around tea time is made up of people circling around while their passengers queue on the stairs of Pearl River to pick up enough take away curried chicken and chips to feed an army. It’s the purest form of Sino-Cork food known to mankind.

I know there’ll be those of you reading this fuming that I didn’t mention your favourite place, the best chipper in the world. But there you have it; Cork people are passionate about their chippers.

Two things about that story. One, it’s almost certainly not true. Two, can you think of one player in the current Irish setup that could have such a tall tale told about him? There’s a miserable list of Paul O’Connell jokelets doing the rounds on the internet – Superman wears Paul O’Connell pyjamas etc – that is actually a list about 1970’s action movie star Chuck Norris with the name changed. From Moss Keane to Chuck Norris; that’s depressing.

Rugby is the hottest thing in Irish sport at the moment because of the grand slam and successive Heineken Cup wins for Munster and Leinster. But, ironically, in this professional age the players seem more like well-mannered accountants than ever. The glint of madness in the eye is gone out of the post match interviews, replaced by talk of objectives, targets and owning the football. It makes rugby hard to love. This is going to matter when the All Ireland championships become less predictable and Trapattoni’s team starts to fulfil its potential.

It’s then that the cash-strapped Irish fan, down to one bandwagon a year, will make his choice. He’ll return to the sports that really matter, GAA and soccer, with all their troubled characters, heroes and villains and teeth-clenching local rivalries that go back years. He’ll ditch rugby because it sounds like a half day course called ‘Grow your Business’ in the Irish Management Institute, and that reminds him of work.

Remember when rugby gave us roguish madmen like Moss Keane, Peter Clohessy and Willie Duggan. Or artists like Mike Gibson and Tony Ward. That’s gone. The last time an Irish rugby player gave us a bit of crack was when Trevor Brennan waded into the crowd at Toulouse and punched a lippy Ulsterman. He was hung out to dry with the phrase ‘last of a dying breed’.

The new breed is a bit weird. Tommy Bowe tells the story of how they tied up the team bagman in the team hotel in the middle of the night and sent him down in the lift. That’s weird. Donncha O’Callaghan is offered to us as head prankster, bringing ducks into team meetings and thing like that, which might be ok if he had a few pints, but Donncha doesn’t drink. That’s a little weird too.

Declan Kidney is the nicest man in the world, but he’s no Mick Doyle. The poster boys are Ronan O’Gara, Brian O’Driscoll, Paul O’Connell, Brian Kearney and yawn. They are photofit nice guys, in a square-jawed American high-school jock sort of way. Their biographies will have a lot of rugby and very little skidding into fields in north Kerry.

Just compare them to the gallery of heroes and villains in GAA. One of the best footballers in the country, Kerry’s Paul Galvin, actually looks like a pantomime villain, as if he puts on a bit of mascara before togging out to play like the devil. Waterford’s John Mullane is part hurling-genius, part madman on the pitch while his county manager, Davy Fitzgerald, is the most entertaining figure in Irish sport and probably Irish life since Roy Keane decided to stop talking to us.

The soccer crowd have the inscrutable Stephen Ireland, a must-watch Trapattoni, the brooding Andy Reid, and Richard Dunne who always looks like he’s going to cry. This isn’t just the next bandwagon. It’s a soap opera too.

This drama is underpinned by genuine, spittle-flecked rivalries. The Leinster and Munster rugby rivalry looks so lame when you watch Cork and Tipp lighting up a Munster championship, May afternoon in Semple Stadium. I listened in recently as two sports mad friends of mine from north Cork chatted about a year of sporting disappointments. Travelling home in separate cars after losing again in the All Ireland to that shower from Kerry, they both came to the same realisation; they hadn’t felt half as bad on the same road back from Croke Park in May when Leinster beat their ‘beloved’ Muster. As one of them put, “it just wasn’t the same.”

Truth will out when you can barely drive the car because you think you’re going to puke with disappointment. And the truth is that rugby doesn’t really matter to Irish people.  It’s neither local enough nor global enough. GAA looks after our deep-seated, local side. Soccer tends to our global ambitions. We know if we qualify for the soccer World Cup we are one of the best sides in the world, unlike the rugby World Cup, where we are basically one of the better sides in the white bits of the former British Empire. That’s a bit Commonwealthy for us, so no thanks. As for the Grand Slam, that rested on us being better than Wales. Lots of places are better than Wales.

Rugby is our social sport, a chance for middle class people to get pissed en masse in Paris. It’s not really about winning. If it’s to mean anything to our national mood, it has to deliver characters living out dramatic tall tales. Instead we get identikit robots achieving targets. The only interesting thing about Irish rugby is the relationship between George Hook and Brent Pope or maybe Tom McGurk’s suits. It’s all in the commentary box. It needs to get onto the pitch. Into the ditch. Like Moss Keane would have done.

The poor man was only pointing out that the economy couldn’t support all of us. Brian Lenihan the Second knows better than to suggest as much twenty five years later, but then he doesn’t need to. Unemployment has doubled in the past year, now standing at almost 265,000. We had net emigration in September. Get out the jumbo lads, we’re off again.

Not surprisingly, official Ireland is spooked at the re-appearance of the emigration bogey man. No sooner were the figures announced than Fine Gael’s Labour Affairs Spokesman, Damien English, started banging on about a “lost generation of youth” and bandying around the dreaded term “net exporter of people”.  This is knee-jerk rubbish.

Rather than rushing to trot out the old lines about emigration, Damien should have watched Reeling in Years on RTE the night the figures were announced. The year was 1987  As the bad jumbos lined up outside, we watched a couple of culchie fellas handing their tickets to the Aer Lingus rep as they made their way out to the cruel plane that was about to take them to the modern day Botany Bay. This was followed by images of the New York skyline as the Fairytale of New York strung up in the background. We were invited to feel sorry for poor Seamus, over in New York when he could have been living at home.

Poor Seamus my arse, over there in the most exciting city in the world. That jumbo to JFK saved Seamus and his mates. They made money, drank hard at the weekend, got laid, got laid off, got new jobs, made more money, met their wives and husbands. Just because they hung around the GAA clubs in the Bronx and Chicago’s southside on Sunday didn’t mean they were pining for home. It meant they were looking for a pint and maybe a start.

Over in London, the Irish guy in the shiny suit staring into his pint on the Kilburn High Road was replaced in the eighties by a wave of Irish professionals on the make, eyeing each up over Friday night pints in the Bunch of Grapes in Knightsbridge. A few with decent French moved to Paris, Seriously, it’s hard to feel sorry for anybody forced to live in Paris. This was no lost generation.

The real reason official Ireland doesn’t like emigration is because we’re such a needy nation. We take population movement personally. Just look at how delighted we were when the wave of immigration started here in the nineties. The media were out asking anybody without freckles how they found it here in Ireland. “Really, you think we’re friendly and welcoming. All your friends do too? That’s great.  Nobody ever said that about us before.” We hounded these poor Poles and Latvians around the streets effectively asking do you like my hair.

The reverse applies with emigration. We’re hurt that anyone should choose to leave here and make a life for themselves overseas. We blame ourselves for being dumped. Bizarrely, we assume there is something wrong with us if every person born here doesn’t decide to spend their entire lives on a windswept island at the edge of Europe that boasts an eight minute summer and thirty eight different words for rain.

Do you know who is to blame for this emotional neediness? Mammy. The Irish mother is the only person who takes it to heart when a child takes off to a better life elsewhere. She’s the one crying at the airport arrivals gate when Seamus comes home for Christmas, hugging him like a crazy dervish as he stands there awkwardly, pointing out that he only moved to Berlin and he was home last month.

Mammy will encourage Seamus’s father to feel upset but you just know that he’s delighted the young fella is getting to see the world, not to mention getting a bit of action with them German ones.  If the father feels anything, it’s envy.

Back on the left-hand side of the brain, we are faced with the rational argument in favour of keeping Seamus on the island at all costs. We know it as the brain drain. This assumes that the brightest are the first to scarper when the going gets tough. They leave behind the idiots who couldn’t figure out how to use the internet to find a job overseas and book a flight to get there and now spend their days sitting around in a sand pit trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole.

It’s bullshit. The recent economic boom wasn’t master-minded in London or New York; it was planned and executed by those who stayed at home. The multi-nationals arrived to find a bunch of bright people, of all ages, bursting to make the most of themselves at home. It was only when they got the ball rolling that the emigrants of the ‘80s generation decided to come back. It worked for everyone.

Emigration isn’t an insult or a brain drain. It’s an opportunity. You only had to look at the people interviewed on RTE news at the recent Working Abroad Expo in the RDS. There was no dejection or resignation, just hope and a general sense of thank Christ we’ve got this as an option. And don’t worry, Mammy, Seamus will be home at Christmas  and even if he brings home that size eight jezebel of a Brazilian girlfriend he met, just imagine what the grandchildren will look like. Line up the jumbos; it’s time we took off again.

The fact is that driving around Cork takes a bit of getting used to. So here are the top 5 things that a vesting motorist should know:

1: Parking Discs

It’s the scratch card where everybody loses. While other places have moved onto meter parking and ticket dispensers – we had them ourselves for a while, but the Corpo took them back because they proved too convenient – on-street parkers in Cork are still stuck with the disc. There are two certainties in parking life on Leeside: you never have an unused disc in the car and as you run up and down shopless side streets looking to buy some, it will rain unusually heavily. When it comes to scratching the time, the rule of thumb is to add ten minutes to the correct start time if you can see a parking warden from your car, thirty minutes if you can’t.  Don’t use lipstick to mend old discs, it ends in tears.

2: Narrow two-say streets

Yes we know it’s odd that a glorified path with cars parked along both sides should take two-way traffic but welcome to Cork. If it looks like you can fit your motor down a lane without losing a wing-mirror then it’s probably a two-way street. Whenever you meet another car on a narrow street like Barrack Street the etiquette goes like this: They flash you to come on. You flash them back to say, ah no sure you come on. They respond by flashing their lights twice and muttering “will ya ever come on, ya langer.” You flash back twice and raise the stakes by waving him on. These stand-offs very often last for hours because your average Cork man would prefer to have somebody obliged to him  rather than get to his destination on time. As a visitor, you will probably blink first and drive on. Make sure your wave of thanks is visible as you drive past or all hell could break loose.

3: Two Rivers

If you need to ask directions just pick somebody walking on the footpath who doesn’t look drunk, wind down the window and shout “Sorry??” at them, followed by your request. Getting directions in Cork is a tricky business though because of the river. People who live south of it might be able to tell you how to get from Ballinlough to Glasheen, but ask them how to get to Farranree and you’ll be met with “Haven’t a clue boy, never up there.” The truth is that you’ve a better chance of getting directions around Shanghai from a southsider than you have of getting hints on how to navigate the northside. It’s not much better in reverse; a northsider friend of mine has never seen the Lough. The other problem with the river is that splits in two around the city centre which means you have to tell visitors to cross the river twice when driving across town. For some reason this drives people from Dublin crazy – “how do ya mean it bleedin’ splits in two?!” – but to be honest it was like that when we got here and there’s not much we can do about it.

4: Multi-Storey Car Parks

If you decide to avoid the parking disc game when you drive into town, then you’ll need to choose a multi-storey car park. There’s a good selection of places strung along the river from City Hall in the east to St Finbarre’s out in the west. That said Cork people only ever want to go to the car parks at Paul’s St or Merchant’s Quay and will queue for an hour to get into them. Feel free to drive straight into the half-empty car park 100m down the road, there’s nothing wrong with it except that locals are slow to try something new in case they’re slagged for being avant garde, which is pronounced ‘langer’ in Cork.

5: Patrick’s Street

Despite appearances Patrick’s Street isn’t actually a pedestrian street. It’s just that if you’re pushing a buggy or drunk or both, you are legally entitled to run across the street at any point without any warning. Don’t blow your horn if somebody runs in front of you. The correct response is to calmly wind down the window and say: “Sorry?? You’re holdin’ up the whole of Pana.” Enjoy your stay in Cork.

A lot of us learned this behaviour at our communion and confirmation dinners. It was here that our parents would moan to each other about their burned offerings, whispering that the egg mayonnaise with Thousand Island dressing tasted “peculiar” followed by: “Shut up, shut up, here he comes”; “How’s the prawn cocktail, madam?”; “Oh it’s lovely, up there with the best.” Then we’d all blush because a man in a uniform had talked to us.

Still though, you’d think we’d have grown out of it by now. It’s not like the service we’re getting is any better than before. The same report shows that the number of hospitality industry customers who felt they had reason to complain has risen from five per cent to 16 per cent in the last year. So things are getting worse, and we’re less likely to complain.

There can be only one answer to this. There is a simmering fury among the Irish people over the banjaxing of the country and that, yes, it’s insulting to be asked to pay €24 for a microscopic steak that would struggle to make it on to a supermarket shelf, served by a Lithuanian girl who looks like she might cry, but if I complain about this now, the whole thing could come out and I might run amok with an axe. The judge will call that an over-reaction.

As a final point, if you didn’t like this article, don’t even think of firing off a letter to the editor. Who do you think you are? An American?