American women are yearning for Irish men. Suddenly there are a multitude of TikTok videos of Lana Del Rey songs captioned “I should be in Ireland with my sexy Irish man”. Some women are even filming themselves writing letters to Santa asking for a special Hibernian man friend for Christmas. (Personally, I’d think they’d get more use out of a Dyson Airwrap in the long term.)
There are social media slide shows of very obviously British cottages and Hunter wellies declaring “this and an Irish husband” as their dream future.
Irish women reacted exactly the way you think they would, asking their foreign counterparts, “Are you okay hun?”
One asked, “Right, who’s been lying to the Americans? Have Irish men collectively launched a marketing campaign? Who is doing their reputation management?” To get these kinds of results it must be Tree Paine, Taylor Swift’s PR bulldog. Have they hired Ivan Yates?
The next question after who is behind this publicity blitz is why?
Is the Irish Government behind this psychological operation to get men to go off abroad with foreign women as a way of easing the housing crisis in Ireland? Or are they trying to lure more young women from abroad here as a way to diffuse the ticking pension bomb by increasing the tax base?
We may never know, but I suspect Cecelia Ahern might be involved somehow. Her delightful books with charming Irish male protagonists provided the gateway drug, especially PS I Love You, where the movie adaptation sees the hot Irish man played by a Scottish actor. But do the Americans and Australians care? Or do they just want a man with a good jawline giving them compliments in a funny little accent?
I have nothing against Irish men. I keep one at home. But having grown up around Irish men, they’re too quotidian for me to romanticise.
“Wouldn’t it be great to meet a guy who owned a castle?” one of my University of Miami friends asked when I first moved to Dublin. I ended up with a man from Galway; I had to break it to her gently that there is no moat, but at least now I get to spend my annual leave in the exotic surroundings of Tuam. I haven’t dated all the men in Ireland so I won’t give in to lazy stereotypes about what it’s like to go out with them. They’re grand like. Which is probably the highest verbal praise they would feel comfortable with.
If I really had to recommend anything to our American sisters, I would tell them not to bother with the men, and get themselves a good Irish woman instead. I want an Irish wife – not in the biblical sense, but rather in the administrative one. Irish women are ruthlessly efficient. They are the natural predator of a long to-do list. They are the masters of GSD – getting shit done. They can run a Fortune 500 company, feed a GAA team unexpectedly popping in for dinner, remember to put the right bins out and retile the bathroom on a slow afternoon. They just crack on with it.
My dream is for a middle-aged Irish woman to come to my house in a Super Nanny type way and fix my life. She would glance around at the tax forms, unclaimed medication rebates, empty fridge, full washing basket, cushions that need replacing and windows that need cleaning. She would look at me with more pity than judgment before declaring, “Right, you need sorting out.” I want a lady who’ll slap her thighs as she gets off the chair while saying, “Now!” That’s the sound of business.
Some of my happiest memories are of living with Irish women in houseshares. The toilet seat might have had the odd fake tan mark, but we made cosy homes together lit by Dunnes scented candles. There were dinner parties, warm fires, tasteful interiors and the odd intellectual discussion over whether Julia Roberts’s accent was bad in Michael Collins, or maybe that was how Kitty Kiernan actually talked. “In fairness no one’s alive to say what she sounded like!”
While I’m safe from the propaganda started by Connell’s silver chain in Normal People and Cillian Murphy’s cheek bones, maybe my relationship is the result of a reverse Australian soft power psyop. After years of watching Home and Away, my poor fellah was convinced Australian girlfriends would be tanned, “no worries” type ocean nymphs. Instead he got a woman with the dress sense and temperament of Russell Crowe.