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Best of Ireland
If you're looking for some laughs, whackiness or entertainment...it's all here.
Luck of the Irish!
Number One: The Weather and Us.
Let’s face it; we live on a rain-lashed little island on the edge of Europe. As a matter of scientific fact, on average, two days out of three bring rain to Ireland. When we get two or three consecutive days of sun, a visitor to the country could be forgiven for thinking that the average Irish person’s skin is an unhealthy shade of red. We’re an optimistic people when it comes to our climate, despite all the drenchings and scaldings over the years; we prefer to forget the nastiness. Then we feel shocked and betrayed when we arrive home dripping wet or desperately searching for the after-sun cream. Do we learn? Not at all! The ultimate triumph of optimism over experience.
Number Two: The Irish and Sports.
We are a nation of sports fanatics. The Saipan incident threatened to plunge Ireland into a second civil war. An Irish person who doesn’t have an interest in some sport is very rare, as rare as the consecutive days of sunshine. Sport, of any kind, is a universal talking point in Ireland. Our very own GAA Hurling and Football are something to be proud of. Gaelic Football is played with an intensity usually reserved for Mafia Turf Wars, and Hurling, the fastest field game on earth, is as once described to an American tourist ‘a cross between ice-hockey and murder’.
Number Three: How We Get From A to B.
Usually, in the civilized world, a signpost system helps a person find their way from one place to another. Not on our quirky little island. Rarely do signposts help at all, how to get around is something that’s passed from generation to generation of locals, possibly through genetics. I often hear tales of lost tourists forced to wander helplessly, sometimes for decades around rural Ireland, after foolishly trusting and following signposts, only to be left in the middle of nowhere, where even GPS can’t help you. And to ensure that these tales continue to emerge in the future, signposts have been changed to Irish, but only in some places, for the rest of Ireland, you can still get lost bilingually.
Number Four: Alcohol (And Other Beverages)
The Irish have a reputation abroad as being a nation of heavy drinkers, a nation that’s permanently tanked. Of course, this is a filthy lie. We’re only second in the world, a serious challenge to that reputation. However a walk down any main street in Ireland at weekend closing times shows that beneath all that falling down and slurred speech, the Irish have a steely determination to take the Czech’s place at the top, and live up to our reputation. For now however, we console ourselves with being the Number One Consumers of Tea in the World. Take that Britain!
Number Five: Politics
Abroad, most political parties identify themselves as liberal or conservative, left or right. Of course, in Ireland, we didn’t really go for that whole concept, and instead, based our politics on agreement or disagreement with a piece of paper from over 80 years ago. Since it was thrown in the bin (70 years ago), the two main political parties haven’t quite had the time to re-define themselves, and so are actually more or less the same. But, don’t despair, there’s also a party that hasn’t done anything really important since 1916, a Party that wants to plant more trees, and a Party that thinks it’s dead tough, but doesn’t realize that everyone else is laughing at it…take your pick!
By: Andrew Gibbons
