2011 is a tricky year for your average Irish man. A lot of good looking women have left the country; he can’t get away from the kids; he’s expected to have a Masters in Economics and he’s growing a nice little belly for himself.

That’s only the start of his problems. How is any Irish man supposed to cope with these changes?

WOMEN.

These are difficult times for Donal. Just as he finally got used to throngs of gorgeous foreign birds walking up and down the town, most of them went back home. Now he’s trying to get back with Irish women who have developed a taste for foreign blokes. It’s a tricky business.

For years the only Eastern European women Donal laid eyes on were at the Olympics; in other words, Eastern German women that reminded him of the simple fella Gerard who worked in the local garage. Then 200,000 Eastern European stunners came over here to work and he agreed with his friend Stinger there were only one way to describe them: Jaysus, There’s No Need for That. The high cheek bones, the turquoise eyes, the tight denim, oh lads. He was walking down the town one night with his girlfriend Edel from Clonmel when two of them came around the corner in shockingly tight jeans. He instinctively said Jaysus, There’s No Need for That to Edel from Clonmel and that was the end of another beautiful relationship.

Karina and Kristina from Latvia started work at the deli in the local Statoil.  Donal moved onto five breakfast rolls a week. As he told Stinger, it’s like getting your breakfast from Cameron Diaz. While Stinger and himself were enjoying a mid-afternoon feed of pints in Joe Mac’s one Friday, who should walk in but the two girls. One thing led to another and it wasn’t long before Stinger was getting sick in the jacks and Donal was telling Kristina that he would like to take her away from all this. She just laughed and said “shut up with your crazy rescue fantasy, Dow-Nall”, before knocking back her seventh pint.  Donal loved that woman and her friend, although nothing ever came of it.

And now, most of the stunners have gone home. Those four Lithuanians who worked at the mushroom factory and looked like Keira Knightley? Gone. The Polish Kate Hudson look-alike who cut his hair in the barbers and said nothing except “you like new man” at the end? She left last week. And the Czech stunner behind the bar at Moriarty’s Lounge Bar, where the five old men who drank there every Friday became the twenty men who drank there every night, trying not to get caught looking at her, some of them dribbling visibly. She’s gone. So is Moriarty’s.

Karina went home and Kristina moved in with a Polish guy called Tomas. The fact that Kristina wasn’t gay came as a huge blow to the local lads who failed when they tried to lob the gob with her and assumed the poor girl must be a lesbian. They can’t even look her in the eye now, particularly as she doesn’t go anywhere without Tomas, who has a skinhead and a tight leather jacket with the words Mega Revenge written in flames across the back of it.

Donal has decided to change tack on the woman front. This recession is hitting all of us, he tells Stinger, it’s time to buy Irish again. He calls up Edel from Clonmel. She tells him about her Spanish boyfriend, Jorge, who reckons she looks like Andrea Corr. Then she hangs up. Donal wonders if he can get a job in Riga.

THE ECONOMY.

Most Irish men like to show off their economic expertise these days, but there’s a real chance you’ll end up looking like a tool.

Remember when it was a sign of intelligence to treat economics with contempt.  Even guys who thought Charlie Haughey was well dodgy were prone to spout “as Charlie himself said of economics, it’s a dismal science.”  We’re all dismal scientists these days.

Darragh loves to show off by being the resident expert on one thing; the real cost of the bank bailout. He never brings up the subject of the economy at a dinner party because that only gets him in trouble with the wife, Lydia, who is sick of being told the real cost of the bank bailout. But he knows someone else is bound to bring it up. He also knows that the real cost of the bank bailout goes up every few days. So he prepares well.

On the morning of a dinner party he locks himself in the living room with a calculator and the latest articles by Colm McCarthy, Brendan Keenan, David McWilliams, Dan O’Brien and Wolfgang Munchau in the Financial Times. (“You don’t read Wolfgang? You’re in the dark ages”, says Darragh, losing another friend forever.) By five o’clock he has the figure. Lydia warns him to steer clear of “your bank bailout gobshitery, these are our friends.” Darragh says no probs honey while making sure not to forget the number 213 billion.

Three hours later and the chat around the table is the same as any other dinner party in Ireland these days;  the worrying increase in Portuguese bond spreads, Merkel’s vulnerability in some elections in Lower Saxony, the threat to our corporate tax rate from French bureaucrats and maybe a bit of  Jedward. Darragh takes it handy through all this until Lydia’s brother-in-law, Nervous Noel, asks will we ever know the real cost of the bank bailout. His wife hisses “Jesus Noel, didn’t I warn you”, but it’s too late.  Darragh speaks for a good 45 minutes, keeping the figure until the end because he reckons that will build suspense. As Darragh says the words “so, in fact, the real cost is just north of 213 billion”, Lydia decides I need to get a guy who can think about something else. I’m getting a divorce.

THE WEIGHT ISSUE.

According to a report last year, 59% of Irish men now regard themselves as overweight or obese. We’ve eaten all the pies. He better shape up or the women will start to look elsewhere.

In the past, there were only two body shapes available to the Irish male. Eddie was a whippet shaped man who ran around like a blue-arsed fly organising raffles for the local GAA and saying things like “by gad Mrs Murph, there aren’t enough hours in the day.” The second shape, Terry, had the same basic whippet frame as Eddie with a twenty pint belly tied on the front. Terry usually wore a giant yellow polo-shirt which allowed the belly drop down towards his knees. Terry liked to jiggle his stomach and say “telling ye lads, a lot of work went into this.” You wouldn’t say Eddie or Terry suffered from body image issues.

Things change. There’s a new breed of Irish man whose main form of exercise is a stroll from his desk to the vending machine. Take Cillian, who is getting himself a grand set of jowls.  That shouldn’t be a problem in his IT job with an American multi-national because a lot of the desk-bound lads there could do with losing a couple of kilos. It doesn’t help that the guys who come to visit from corporate HQ in Phoenix are man-mountains.  Cillian watches Dale or Shawn puffing his way down the corridor at 1 mile a day and thinks God, I’m really glad I keep myself in shape.

Cillian’s day starts with breakfast in the canteen, where he sits next to Olga from the Spanish Help Desk. He’s got it bad for Olga, but she called him a pig one day when he arrived over with a full Irish. Now he has a yoghurt and banana just like her, which isn’t a problem really because he downed two bowls of Cheerios and a few slices of toast with Nutella before he left for work. He spends most of the day instant-messaging Olga about her arch enemy Lucia because like any good Irish man he realises the way to a woman’s heart is to agree that some other random girl is a complete bitch.  The instant messaging is handy because whenever Olga tells him she’s tied up on a conference call, he’s can run to the vending machine for a Yorkie without getting caught.

Of course it doesn’t help that when Cillian goes home every second weekend, his Mammy shovels steak and potatoes into him accompanied with the catch cry of all Irish Mammies: “Sure, aren’t you a growing boy.” Indeed he is Cillian’s Mam and that’s the problem.

His arch enemy is a Killorglin guy from network support called Ciaran. This weirdo trains three times a week and goes home most weekends to play Gaelic with his culchie friends. He never plays on his X-Box until 3 in the morning. He is often to be seen eating a banana. Olga just added him as a friend on her Facebook page. There will be trouble ahead.

There’s a lot more Cillians than Ciarans these days. The newly tubby Irish man will have to trim a bit, or he won’t stand a chance against fit culchies and slim foreigners with a slick line in compliments.

THE INFERIORITY COMPLEX.

A whole generation of Irish men has grown up not knowing how to hate itself. This has to change if we are to thrive in the new Europe.

It was different in the past. Twenty years ago, Self-Loathing Liam made a name for himself across Europe. As his German friend Karl told him at the Munich October festival “We Germans love other people’s misery but for the Irish, there is nothing funnier than your own.”

But then a new breed of Irishman emerged, Cocky Kian. Cocky Kian pitied the French with their 10% unemployment and 3% growth. He knew a lot about property prices. Worst of all, Cocky Kian liked himself. He thought his uncle Self-Loathing Liam was pathetic, laughing at Tommy Tiernan and Dara O’Briain with their jokes about how rubbish the Irish are at everything. “Like that’s going to get you over the goal line with a foreign bird. Just tell her you’re Irish and say Ker-ching – they’ll figure it out, man.”

Whenever his Italian colleague Fabio started on about the weather in his home town during the summer, Cocky Kian would pipe up with “ya, but the only jobs there are driving me and my mate Phelim around in your taxi so we can like score with your women.” That was Cocky Kian for ya.

He’s better known these days as Kian. When his two year old BMW was repossessed from the car park last year, Fabio shouted “hey Kian, you wanna buy a sheety little Fiat Panda”. Kian tried to throttle him with a printer cable and it would have been curtains if he hadn’t been able to blackmail the married one from HR about their quickie in the lift at last year’s team-building event in Wicklow. Close one.

This is very difficult for Kian. He doesn’t want to act like yesterday’s man, Self-Loathing Liam. As he told Phelim, that would be like using his 2007 iPhone and that didn’t even have 3G. But he overheard Liam at a funeral recently saying “imagine, the banks gave me a 300 grand mortgage, ME!, the biggest eejit in the world” to another uncle, Worthless Willie.  The two men fell around laughing.

Could this be the road to happiness? Kian has decided to get in touch with his worthless side. These days he spends his nights watching Fr. Ted repeats and has taken up a new course designed specifically for his generation. It’s called ‘I’ll Never Amount to Anything: How Self-Loathing Can Make you Popular with Others’.

GIVE ME SOME PEACE.

A huge problem for the modern Irish man is getting some time on his own. Take Ultan. He is very much in love with his girlfriend Caroline. When they started dating, he couldn’t stop feeling her up in public and saying “ooh, you are one luv-le lay-dee” in a very bad Yorkshire accent.

Now they live together with their children Eva and Jack. He can’t get enough of Caroline and the kids, but Jesus wept is it too much to ask that I get an hour to myself that doesn’t involve talking about Peppa Pig, which school would be best for Jack and a very long story from Caroline about how the woman in front of her in Tesco (bitch) completely shat all over her by forgetting to pick up frozen fruits of the forest and then she went all the way back to the freezer section and then Ultan started thinking about that episode of the Simpsons where Homer puts on these glasses that make it look like he’s listening to Marge, but actually he’s gone to sleep. Caroline stops her story to ask Ultan if he’s thinking about Homer’s glasses and when he said yes she stormed off to Mammy’s for two days.

Ultan tried to solve this a while back with a Man-Shed out the back. Caroline gave this her backing because she thought it might get him into DIY, but Ultan is Mister Bean and all she got out of it was a rickety kennel for their Labrador which collapsed on poor Bertie one night during a very small storm.

Ultan headed indoors and made himself a den under the stairs before Caroline got a chance to turn it into their third jacks. He bought an X-Box and disappeared into a world of killing Nazis on Medal of Honor. No more watching Desperate Housewives on the couch with Caroline thinking if a tiger broke into the house now and bit off my head it wouldn’t be as bad as watching this heap of shite.

Best of all, he could enjoy some bloke time while he was at it. His friend Turlough is a 41 year old management accountant, but on Medal of Honor he’s just plain old The Brigadier. Ultan enjoyed chatting to Turlough on instant messenger while blowing up the SS, agreeing that if’s there one thing better than spending time with the family, it’s spending time on your own along with 3000 other fathers around the world who will tire of killing Nazis.

Then Caroline got the boys a Wii for Christmas. Shit. Something that can be used by all the family. Ultan blames those Nintendo ads with Jamie Redknapp and his hot missus where they’re all playing happy families and nobody needs help with their homework or can’t stop laughing at the word fart. So now, Ultan time is ruined playing virtual tennis with Caroline. She keeps beating him and saying sorry and he keeps saying no you’re fine, well played and she says so stop doing that thing with your teeth you do when you’re pissed off and he wonders where it all went wrong. He’s gone from making the world safe for democracy to losing at tennis to a woman who couldn’t hop up a ball in the real world.

There is only one good thing about playing tennis on the Wii. It means they can’t play karaoke. He only has to hear Caroline squealing “first I was afraid, I was petrified” and he’s off dreaming about a tiger breaking into the house again. Things are so bad, that he’s thinking of taking an evening course in DIY at the community school. Although, that does mean clearing out the man shed. Nothing comes easy these days.

PAYING HIS WAY.

A feature of Celtic Tiger Ireland was Bill Wrestling. That was the point in a night out when the waiter had delivered the bill to a table of three couples and the men started “would you give me that, get away out of that sure didn’t you pay last week, fair is fair, ah come on now it’s definitely my shout.” There was usually 2 bottles of wine each consumed at this point so it often ended up with Gav shouting “I’m paying the f**king bill!” at his best friend Lenny as he pinned him up against the wall.  The whole restaurant twigs that Lenny must be richer than Gav.

Of course these days, nobody is sure about anyone else’s finances. And the little bit of farmer that lurks in every Irishman means that nobody talks about it much. Gav and Lenny’s mate Scobie will only say “shure it could be worse”, which is hilarious given that his creditors had him in  the High Court last week over the collapse of Scobie Developments. Let’s just say that when they go out for dinner with ‘the wives’ these days, Scobie is odds on to win out at Bill Wrestling.

Gav and his Lenny wonder if they should cover Scobie  while he sorts out the  finances, but then Gav and Lenny work in the public service and will be the first people to tell you they didn’t cause this recession. And they have already taken two pay cuts. Did I already mention we didn’t cause this recession? You did, Gav.

It all came to a head last month when the three lads were out for a pint in Jack Mac’s.  Scobie started sobbing and said:  “Sorry, lads, I can’t pay for my round. And Maria left me, took the kids.” Nobody spoke for a few minutes until Gav suggested they should have their Friday night pints in his place to save money. It’s an Irish solution to an Irish problem.

Gav has a giant games room he built to escape from the kids. Everybody brings their own booze, so Scobie can have a night out for under a tenner. Except after seven pints he says “I tell ya lads, you’d miss the old letching at the Czech one Nadia behind the bar in Jack Mac’s when you’ve a few pints on boards.” So they all get a taxi into town for a late one. And Scobie insists “I don’t want any messing when we get in here now lads – it’s my round.”

MAMMY

Finally, it’s Mother’s Day. As we know, the chief job of the Irish mother is to prepare her children for hard knocks in later life by telling them they’ll never amount to anything and there is no point in trying. So all over the country today the Irish male is bringing Mammy to a really expensive restaurant and giving her a card that says “you told me not to bother, I’d never be a winner, and yet here I am today, splashing out for dinner. Love always, Tadhg.”

That is except for broke developers like Scobie whose card says “Please don’t write me out of the will Mammy, your ‘couple of bob’ in the Post Office could save me yet. Love always, Scobie (your favourite son).”