MORE STUFF IRISH PEOPLE LOVE
Colin Murphy & Donal O’Dea
First published 2012 by The O’Brien Press Ltd 12 Terenure Road East, Rathgar, Dublin 6, Ireland. Tel: +353 1 4923333; Fax; +353 1 4922777 Email: books@obrien.ie; Website: www.obrien.ie ISBN: 978-1-84717-355-3
Copyright for text © Colin Murphy, Donal O’Dea 2012 Copyright for editing typesetting and design © The O’Brien Press Ltd A catalogue record for this title is available from The British Library All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission from the publisher. 12345678 12 13 14 15 16 17 Cover design: Donal O’Dea Cover image based on ‘Mother Mary at Grotto’ by Kitsen, courtesy of Dreamstime Printed and bound in Spain by Imago. The paper used in this book is produced using pulp from managed forests
Picture Credits: page 39: Arron Roseberg; p47: Tom Creggan photographed by Joe Mabel; p49: Emmet Murphy; p59: Wendel Fisher; p67: Reproduced by kind permission of Inpho; p69: Mario Antonio Pena Zapateria; p84: Sean Rowe; p91: Softeis; p95: O’Dea; p97: Frederic Salein; p115: William Murphy; p116: Anthony McGuinness; p119: Donna Sheets; p121: Paddy Junki.
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Packing the ‘makings of a fry’ to take on holiday. As Irish people we enjoy mocking the prevalence of restaurants and bars in sunny holiday resorts that loudly advertise ‘English Fish ’n Chips here!’ written on a large British Union flag. ‘I mean, for Jaysus’ sake, what are the English like?’ we tut-tut, and shake our heads despondently at our neighbours’ lack of sophistication. Here they are, in Spain or Italy, home to an infinite variety of wonderful tapas or pasta dishes and wines to die for, and what do they do but sit around all day stuffing their faces with greasy, battered smoked cod and chips and quaffing pints of Carling Red Label? Having expressed our disgust and amusement at the sight, many of us Irish then promptly head back to our holiday apartments, dig out the Galtee
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rashers, Superquinn sausages and Clonakilty pudding (black and white) that we packed away with our knickers and jocks, and proceed to make a giant, greasy fry-up that we’ll demolish on the balcony, accompanied by mugs of Barry’s or Lyons tea, a box or two of which we also crammed in beside our sun tan lotion and bikinis. A few packs of Jacobs Mikado or Kimberley biscuits are also likely to have made the trip, and these will do nicely as dessert. We rationalise this behaviour by saying stuff like, ‘Sure those Spanish sausages are bleedin’ brutal,’ or ‘Where am I goin’ te get black puddin’ in feckin’ Lanzarohee?’ And who can argue with that? But, unlike our English friends, we prefer to keep our little home food fetishes to ourselves, just so we can parade around foreign climes pretending we’re well-travelled food sophisticates, and feeling superior. Later, of course, us and our other half will very likely proceed to the local hostelry where we will get completely rat-arsed. And sneaking into the ‘Genuine English Takeaway’
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on the way home for a batterburger and chips is purely for medicinal reasons: ‘Hey, Fiona, we’d better get some soakage or we’ll be bleedin’ despera with de hangovers tomorrow.’ To which Fiona will reply: ‘Yeah, we can make chip sambos. An’ ye know, I tink I’ve still got some of dat Brennan’s Batch Loaf left dat we packed in with de socks.’
Using tool metaphors. ‘What are they on about?’, you say. ‘I never use tool metaphors’. No? So you’ve never had a rake of drink, eh, ye dozy spanner? And don’t try and claim that you’ve never told someone, most likely your kids, not to shovel their dinner into them. And talking of kids, those little chisellers do tend to plough through the money, don’t they? Really, it’s enough to make you want to go out tonight and get completely hammered. Of course, the ultimate Irish tool metaphor is, well, ‘tool’ itself, which of course has two distinct meanings. The first is ‘that crowd in the Dáil are
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a right bunch of tools’, which clearly in this case can have no meaning other than ‘idiots’. And then there’s the other version, its meaning self-evident in the ever popular phrase used by female members of Ireland’s cultural elite: ‘He has a tool on him as long as a well-hung donkey on Viagra.’
Singing ‘Olé Olé Olé’ to support Irish teams in any sport. Now here’s an interesting thought for those countless Irish football (and other sporting disci-
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plines) supporters who love to chant ‘Olé Olé Olé’ whenever an Irish player manages to get a touch of the ball. Besides the fact that it is more commonly associated with bullfighting, one theory on the true origin of the word ‘Olé’, is that it is a corruption of the Arabic invocation of ‘Allah’, which was repeated over and over in praise of the Muslim God, i.e. ‘Allah! Allah! Allah!’ The very notion of this might send the few fanatical Irish Catholics that are left scurrying to confession in search of absolution for inadvertently worshipping the god of another religion, as of course they know with absolute, one hundred percent certainty that they alone worship the one true God. But we digress. Back to ‘Olé’, which some Irish fans probably believe is the brand name of the face cream their missus keeps in the cupboard in the jacks, while others mistakenly think it is a bullfight-
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ing chant. But, apparently, it originated, at least in a sporting context in, surprise, surprise, Spain, back in the 1980s after Real Sociedad had won La Liga. Their fans started chanting ‘Campeones, campeones, hobe, hobe, hobe’. Hobe is Basque, (we looked this up) which means ‘We are the best’. This itself was misunderstood in wider Spain to mean ‘Oé Oé Oé’, as in ‘A por ellos, oé’ which approximates as ‘Here we go’, and if you listen carefully when watching a Spanish football match, this is what the fans are chanting, and not ‘Olé’ (which means ‘bravo’), so, in effect, we are chanting a word that is probably an incantation to Allah and in a sporting context is a misinterpretation of a misinterpretation of a word that has nothing to do with football, and certainly nothing to do with Irish football! However, as Wikipedia notes, ‘Olé Olé Olé’ has been ‘appropriated by the supporters of the Republic of Ireland national football team.’ This is inaccurate, as it has also been appropriated by supporters of Irish camogie teams, rugby teams, boxing teams, synchronised swimming teams and even Irish cricket teams. And while it’s sort of a
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shame that we couldn’t have come up with a chant that had some authentic Irish connection, you have to admit that ‘Olé Olé Olé’s’ Irish equivalent isn’t quite as catchy: ‘Ar aghaidh linn’, ‘Ar aghaidh linn’.
Moving Statues. When Ballinspittle in County Cork launched the phenomenon of the ‘moving statue’ onto the world stage back in the innocent days of 1985, the BBC’s ‘Newsnight’ programme reported that over a quarter of a million people had visited the site within weeks of the apparent visitation by the Virgin Mary. Little did we know then, but Ballinspittle was just the first stop on a nationwide tour of Ireland that the Blessed Virgin had embarked upon, clashing with several boy bands who had the same idea. Watching that BBC report (it is available on YouTube) in post-fundamentalist-Catholic Ireland, one might be struck by a nagging suspicion, despite the relative respect paid by the BBC reporter, that at any moment he might burst into hysterical laughter. And
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who could blame him? We all look back now ourselves and snigger, but the sniggers weren’t that prevalent at all back in the 1980s, and there are many among us still who would be reluctant to admit that they gave the possibility of a miracle serious consideration. Yes, we as a people were that pathetic. Of course, during the Nineties and Noughties, we largely abandoned our spiritual beliefs in favour of worshipping easy money, and did so with equal fervour as those Ballinspittle devotees, once again proving what a gullible, easily-led bunch of gobshites we are! For those too young to recall the strange event(s), here’s a quick guide. In July 1985, a group of thirteen worshippers were making their
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regular visit to the Ballinspittle shrine to the Virgin Mary, when one of them noticed that the statue was breathing, and several of the others saw that the statue’s hands were moving, (whether they were waving, clapping, twiddling, wiggling or drumming their fingers was never clarified). Unlike most people who, faced with an apparently inanimate object springing to life, would leg it like the bejaysus, this group interpreted the painted plaster statue’s movement as a visitation by the Virgin Mary and rejoiced, then hastily reported it to all and sundry. The Irish people, then as now in the grip of a deep recession, descended on Ballinspittle in their droves, perhaps in search of a spiritually uplifting experience to ease their gloom, perhaps in search of a job in the now-thriving local tourist economy. Not to imply that the entire thing was a clever marketing ploy by the local Chamber of Commerce, as nobody doubts the word or selfbelief of the original witnesses any more than they doubt the self-belief of the Yaohnanen tribe on the South Pacific island of Tanna, who heartily believe that Britain’s Prince Philip is a divine being. But, before you could say a decade of Hail
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Marys and a few Our Fathers, reports of other moving statues were pouring in from all over the country, testifying to the fact that the Virgin Mary was on a nationwide tour. Statues were leaping into life at a phenomenal rate in Kerry, Kilkenny, Waterford, Mayo, Tipperary etc, and, not content just to move, they had now added bleeding, hovering and crying to their list of startling abilities. People everywhere waited with bated breath for the first report of a Virgin Mary break-dancing or even perhaps giving a rousing rendition of ‘She Moved through the Fair’. There were also, it must be noted, sceptics. But by then Ireland had embraced the moving statue so much (and possibly been embraced back) that these were dismissed as atheistic crackpots. Scientific explanations offered included the possibility of Mary’s halo of electric lights in the darkness creating the illusion of movement, the power of mass suggestion, the auto kinetic effect, and lastly, the people of Ireland being completely bonkers. One might think that in these (so-called) more enlightened times, the phenomenon of the moving statue has moved on (ha ha), but within the last
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decade the BBC and RTÉ were back to record documentaries about the episode and many of the Ballinspittle locals still stand by their stories, including a former Garda sergeant who claimed the statue became airborne. Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, there is much talk during the present recession of people flocking back to churches to renew the faith they had abandoned in exchange for filthy, borrowed lucre during the Celtic Tiger years, so the possibility exists that we may soon have another crazy summer of statue-shifting. You read it here first. But the last word goes to the Dublin wit who, during the summer of 1985, left a sign hanging around a statue of the Virgin Mary in Sandymount reading: ‘Out of Order’.
Saying ‘Jaysus!’. Originally a word of Dublin origin, ‘Jaysus!’, like the Virgin Mary in the previous piece, has been on the move and nowadays is often heard exclaimed loudly in towns and