The Irish

destroy: the current amurrican hard on for all things irish.

"Father Ted" was a load of arse-juice but the "D'unbelievables"...

Destroy: What Ned said about St. Paddy's in the USA, my ridiculous "Kiss Me I'm Irish" relatives: stop the Erin Go Bragh insanity please!, the Cranberries, Hothouse Flowers, the Troubles (wouldn't that be nice?).

I lurve leprechauns. And shamrock shakes.

Now, Irish Americans, that's *quite* a different story.

I love Ireland solely because of Guinness, Murphy's and Bailey's. I'm a lush.

Destroy: The food.

I believe it was Shane MacGowan once poignantly said: "Ertwas swillin' 'n' sllen/ inna mrsts o' Culcllan/ er pour me a-point o' whiskey t'day..."

My favorite Ireland memory: driving up the Conor Pass on the Dingle Peninsula, parking the car and hiking up a mountain. The view of the countryside, the ponds, the sheep and the sea was breathtaking, of course. But what was really remarkable was just how quiet it all was -- I could hear the grass crunching under my feet and I thought I was stepping on dried out grass, till I realized that it sounded so loud only because it was so quiet. I'd literally never "heard" silence like that before. I realized then how really loud even "quiet" moments are where I live, how there's always some sort of ambient noise in the background disrupting the perfect quiet. And then you just stand there, with the knockout view in the closest thing to perfect peace and quiet I'd ever experienced. Then you walk down and throw some money at the person playing some cliche Irish music on a harp at the foot of the hill.

destroy people who say: "I'm Irish, my mother's brother's budgie was bought from a pat shop in Galway"

paddy's night in Kilburn too, destroy that, even more so in Neasden.

search: Tony Cascarino

Anybody want to recommend some traditional Irish music? There's so much stuff out there and a lot of it looks terrible.

Ooops, sorry I thought this was an ILM thread 'cos I was on ILM and then I did a search and so I thought...I know...I am dumb.

And it's quite a late night for me.

'search' and 'destroy'? UMkay

Ned, not quite full blown trad....but you can't go wrong with Christy Moore.

Specifically, I'd recommend Planxty's 2004 (or is it 2005? I can't remember) live album, which is brilliant and has Christy Moore singing on it. Any one of the first four Chieftains albums are also top class. Martin Hayes is also very popular and good, and there's a great, great singer called Iarla O Lionaird who sings unaccompanied Irish songs. His voice is beautiful, but it can get a little wearing after a while if you don't understand what he's singing about.

The Dubliners ain't half bad either.

luke kelly.

also, what's with lack of WB Yeats love upthread?

Ned's question inspired me to dig out that Planxty 2004 album. It is GRATE.

Ned, not quite full blown trad....but you can't go wrong with Christy Moore.

My lord, the prosecution cites "Don't Forget Your Shovel".

search: Planxty's "The Well Below The Valley", if only for the title track.

My lord, the prosecution cites "Don't Forget Your Shovel".

Also "The Voyage", and his version of "Ride On".

xpost

If it's the same one the Devil's Interval do then it's got incest and 6 cases of abortion/infanticide, body count is the hallmark of a good folk song.

Planxty, yes - I only know the first three albums though. Also that Andy Irvine+Paul Brady album - in fact, is Andy Irvine famous? He's certainly not as famous as he should be! (He's also from London, of course!)I don't know as much about Irish music as I should.

yes well, not every track! I'm out of my depth here, and I've forgotten my shovel.

Planxty, yes - I only know the first three albums though. Also that Andy Irvine+Paul Brady album - in fact, is Andy Irvine famous?

he is famous enough, but maybe not as famous as he deserves to be. He plays live a lot in Whelans, and every time I go to see him I kick myself for not going to see him every time he plays, as he is awesome.

In a piece of inspired supportage, the first time I saw him was when he was supporting Will Oldham; a whole new generation of fans was born.

He is awesome. Everything I've ever heard him do, from Sweeney's Men onwards, has been great, and he always seems like the most talented and yet least well known in whatever setup he's involved in.

I think he is all about the music rather than about the self-promotion.

I love his song about how Ronnie Drew is actually a culchie.

CINCINNATI -- A man was caught Tuesday morning inside a car with his pants down.

Police said Kim Leblanc broke into a parked car overnight on Central Parkway, and the owner found him asleep inside and called police.

Officers said Leblanc was not wearing any pants when they arrived.

Investigators said Leblanc told them he had done drugs and believed that a leprechaun had let him into the car.

Leblanc remains in police custody on a variety of charges.

top scientist claims irish less intelligent than other ethnicities,

blames leprechaun influence.

Thieving Irish. Here's something funny: I'm American, and my grandfather raised us to be conscious of our Irish heritage. We just find out our Irish side actually came from England ... and had lived there for centuries before coming to the US, rather than actually coming here from Ireland during the potato/weird root tasting beer/cable knit sweater famine.

So what's the deal with that - English, Irish, what? I'm sure most of the people who claim Irish heritage here are less of Irish heritage than suspected.

http://www.dk-ink.com/AngelsRemembered/files/leprechaun.gif

Oh who knows. My family could care less about it, we're American...but my boyfriend's family is v v proudly Irish...except at this point all their relatives back home live in the Leith district of Edinburgh. At least they're all Hibs supporters!

um, hibs aren't the 'irish' team in scotland.

they are one of the Irish teams, as far as I know. especially if you live in Edinburgh. Scots may know better.

Hibs were the "Irish" team in Scotland before Celtic were.

If by "Irish" you mean "charitable club set up by members of the Catholic church to provide aid to poverty stricken Catholics who were mostly Irish immigrants" or something. Hibernian means Irish, doesn't it?

there was actually an official gingerbread Iceberger variant a few years back

For some reason I don't remember Winner or Chunky or the impractical-looking Boomy. I'm with the Loop the Loop gang, an indelible classic.

Chunky was just a jumped up choc ice iirc? Boomy was a favourite in our household even though it was expensive. Loop the loop I remember stopping eating during a mad cow disease scare cos they had gelatine in them, lmao

(For like two months, not forever)

On another note, we need to discuss this shitshow.

https://archive.is/i1Ywu

These boys hover around London’s Irish like fruit flies to an overripe banana, trying at all times to remind us just how much they hate England too, their eyes desperately pleading for acceptance – and forgiveness. They suck down pints of Guinness in our famous haunts, trying to get our attention with their G-splitting skills. They tell us, unprompted, just how amazing we all are, and how they think it’s about damn time we got those six counties back. (Cheers, Rupert – I’ll let the Irish Republicans know that the battle is over, because some 23-year-old from West Hampstead has said it should be.)

Atrocious piece.

That is bad.

Doesn't really go far enough, it's hardly just posh men called Rupert who are doing England's version of the Simpsons "America's brief obsession with Australia", but for Ireland. It's actually a fairly wide range of English people.

The Guinness trend seems to cross a lot of different groups from hipsters and hipster yuppies, men and women, to Essex lads in quilted jackets.

But whatever it is, it is not a posh Tory thing as far as I can see. The faux-Irish trend is arguably most prominent among English leftists, who would never feign being another race but seem to think they can cosplay as Irish with impunity. The posh Brits don't want to pretend to be a beleaguered underclass, since that carries no currency in their circles.

As such the piece is a swing and a miss for me. But to connect it would need to target too many people all at once, many of whom work in the media.

Is it that bad? I dunno, its nice English people actually give a shit about the Irish for once

xp feel free to rant at length on this, I feel this is just a fraction of your true feelings

My (late 60s, Northern English) father-in-law is mad for splitting the G

His heart's in the right place, but it's occasionally wearying when you just want to have a pint

The splitting the G thing is big amongst zoomers here now. I went out for a pint with some younger work colleagues last year and they were encouraging me to "split the G". I didnt know wtf they were on about.

Going to a Catholic school in the West Midlands there were lots of kids who thought of themselves as at least a bit Irish, usually due to grandparents, my friend Big James for one, he would only go to Irish pubs and started on Guiness before he was 18, he's moved to New Jersey now.

My (Scottish) teen nephews were asking me if I would split the G at Xmas when we had family drinks at the pub. Even the youngest who is like 13. At first I rubbished it but by pint three I couldn't resist a small demonstration.

On the responses upthread, I honestly don't feel too strongly about it beyond thinking it's stupid and occasionally hypocritical, and that people gleefully co-opt Irish stuff in a way that they would never do for other cultures. But the flipside of that is Irish people are prob the most invisible, privileged minority in the UK. That means sometimes people, regardless of their politics, assume we are not in fact our own country with our own ethnicity. That can be frustrating.

But in the grand scheme of things not so much.

I know the past has always seen people with Irish roots in England or like English people listening to Irish music or whatever, but it hits a little different when you have supposedly left leaning English people actively trying to be Irish, and I mean by applying for spurious passports as much as splitting the g.

Like a lot of an Irish person's identity in England ime is "I am not you" or "we are not you". I don't really welcome "we want to be you" as a result.

Isn't the spurious passport thing more mercenary than cosplay? It's a way to get in those coveted EU cues at airports.

I guess it's a legal/bureaucratic version of the same thing, but some of the attitudes behind it feels similar, like just blithe ignorance.

Is now the right time to admit I don’t know what splitting the g is

Don’t bother explaining it to me, I googled and, ok

there was actually an official gingerbread Iceberger variant a few years back

― Number None, 08 July 2025 10:15 (nine hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

fuckin hell i missed this

also i bought a quilted jacket last week 😭

It codes slightly differently in Ireland? I mean slightly? Why did you buy one in summer would be another question, if I was the parish priest, or indeed the local garda.

sale

the trees are in their autumn beauty
the woodland paths are dry
under the october twilight the water
mirrors a still sky
a debut jacket, britlike quilted,
though purchased in july

Love TAYTO😋 It’s so good!! pic.twitter.com/Qmyat0Sr98

— Hiroshi Suzuki (@AmbJapanUK) July 10, 2025

That’s the wrong one!

Is there anything as summer essential as a filling station 99?

I havent treated myself to one yet this summer. Theres time yet.

ive had the odd good one

Only young women aged 17-22 make good 99s. If you see anyone outside of this demographic category putting on the glove don't get your hopes up. A 99 should be about the overall height of an academy award.

Supermacs I can't get excited about.

i have found that a youngfella with twinkly blue eyes in wexford of about six and a half feet and aged about 18 will make my wife a hundredweight of a 99 if she smiles at him while ordering

is that anything

Only young women aged 17-22 make good 99s. If you see anyone outside of this demographic category putting on the glove don't get your hopes up. A 99 should be about the overall height of an academy award.

This was immediately disproved in the county’s best provider of them as recently as last month

Woman might have been 24

i hadnt a comment on how her age presented tbh

She wasn’t that young now that I think about it

99 was irreproachable regardless

Men over 30 leave the shop

Just a spectacular case

https://www.rte.ie/news/courts/2025/1103/1541819-dj-carey-sentencing/

presume the Netflix series is already in the works

pretty funny that he's trying to get out of his fake cancer comeuppance by citing health concerns though

presume the Netflix series is already in the works

hang the dj

it is an amazing story for sure tho. i love how one bloke found out he was being scammed because dj had said he was in seattle getting treatment but the guy turned on the telly and saw him at a hurling match.

Intensive Carey

lol

Carey Movie

Pariah Carey

i only learned about all these shenanigans a couple of years ago and was v perplexed because last i heard he was just a big hurling star.

ok look he hasnt behaved well and obviously there's a level of carry on im not defending but shenanigans?

just maybe lets all calm down and not rush in here

also

have ye read about his sister

yeah i read quite a bit about this a couple of years ago. i feel like the wikipedia pages have thinned considerably, though that might be imagination.

xp give me the short version, are we talking Conor McGregor’s sister type of thing

https://www.rte.ie/news/2024/1204/1484611-catriona-carey-charged/

picked an rte link for sharing purposes and go from there

at it while on trial for it for years, an absolute grifter