"Yes! We're all [Irish] individuals"

"How 'Irish' are ewe though?"

As someone who was born on the island of Ireland in the 'country' U.K, who straddles the border travelling from Fermanagh to Dublin on a weekly basis, studies English in Ireland's foremost English-founded Irish University, plays hurling, eats potatoes and not much else, studied the Irish language in the British education system, likes traditional Irish music, enjoys a solid pint of stout (owned by French company) and, with numerous pints on board, will break into songs of old Ireland and past heroes and old triangles and the like, I find the topic of Irishness comes up a lot on a day to day basis.

I'm not going to go too deep into it here, as I believe I have already written a couple of years ago in Identity Crisis it made my head hurt then, and not much has changed. But I would like to point out a particular strain of Irishness spearheaded by sites like joe.ie. Look at these:

The first is a story where "Successful Irish Musician tweets about crisps unsuccessful Irish people also eat," the second may as well be called "do we all like tea? yes we do, we're Irish after all," and the third is not even worthy to be called clickbait. I mean I like tea, crisps and Father Ted as much as the next man (or woman) and, people who know me might even find this post hypocritical, but they do not define me individually, I can't believe I just wrote that but it has to be done, nor are they necessary components of Irishness (although Father Ted may be an exception). Sites like joe.ie have combined Irishness with Lad culture and found a winning formula, where everyone joins in on the jokes best summed up in the video below. Yet there is nothing clever or subversive and therefore nothing Irish about a humour that turns everyone into backwards, nostalgic sheep, at least not pertaining to the idea of Irish humour which I hold dear.