Conor Kenny
Staff Writer
When I was about eight years old, I remember my grandparents watching The Quiet Man on VHS on one of our many wet and windy family holidays in Glengarrif. One scene that stood out for me was the bit where Mary Kate explains to Michael how romance in Ireland is done.
“Well, we just started a-courtin’, and next month, we, we start the walkin’ out, and the month after that there’ll be the threshin’ parties”.
Even as a kid (although I pretended to feel revolted by the mushiness) I actually remember thinking it was quite cute at the time. It’s certainly a million miles from what you hear these days. “Well”, I heard a bloke say to some lucky girl last year, “we just started scoring, in a few minutes you’ll take me out the back for a quickie in the alley outside Alchemy, and then when it shuts we’ll go for a kebab”.
When you think about it, Ireland should really be one of the most romantic places in the world. It has all that literature by people like Oscar Wilde and Yeats, plenty of rustic green scenery, and more patriotic martyrs than you can shake a shillelagh at. So what on earth’s happened since then?
It seems like we’ve gone backwards to the sophistication levels of the Iron Age Celts. As much as some girls would like to pin the blame on the Laddish culture of Soccer AM and Top Gear, I just don’t see it myself.
Still none of them are able to explain to me how blokes reading FHM is any different to girls ogling the lads posing outside that naff clothes store on Dame Street. I could give you some philosophical waffle about how both sexes have denigrated beauty and romance into a materialistic, socially iconographic routine; but really I just reckon girls are able to get away with murder.
Undeniably my flat mate from Milan is better romantically trained than me. Italians’ clothes, their language, even their food just exude passion. I mean, what are women more likely to find aphrodisiacal when they’re being wined and dined – beef stew and a bit of soda bread, or something with a name like pollo alla cacciatora?
Last year the flat mate in question bought a rose for a girl he was fond of – not for any special occasion – simply because he thought it was romantic. For whatever reason, that kind of thing just doesn’t work in this country.
The other day, for example, I tried surprising my girlfriend by sending flowers using InterFlora. Far from being the romantic gesture I had hoped for, the flowers ended up at Centra awaiting collection from my girlfriend who had to shuffle nervously down to collect her mysterious package. It was more like the ending to Se7en than anything out of The Quiet Man.
Yeats, when he wasn’t busy being a mopey sod over Maud Gonne, seemed to have a fair bit of foresight. In his poem September 1913 he wrote, “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone” and, nearly a hundred years later, that certainly seems to have remained the case. Unless you fancy that kebab…?
