I locked myself out of my hotel room in the north of England a few years back. When I told the man at reception what I’d done, he shrugged and said, ‘typical Irish’.

Many Irish people living in England know what this feels like. Raised on a diet of Paddy Irishman jokes, some English people have been conditioned to think that the Irish are a bit thick.

We’d drive ourselves mad if we took it too personally. I smiled, accepted the replacement key, and moved on with my day. There really didn’t seem to be much malice in his remark.

That night I was performing in a local comedy club and one of the acts started doing an impression of an ‘Irish bomb disposal expert’, complete with a cartoonish sing-song lilt. Later in his set he whipped out a prop book called ‘the Catholic Directory’ in which he’d stuffed the pictures of a number of famous paedophiles. The punters lapped it up.

I wasn’t offended, I was fascinated. This sort of hackneyed slop wouldn’t cut it in London but in provincial Britain the racist gags of the 1970s still have an audience. Watching the crowd laugh and clap from the back of the room, I felt like I’d stepped through a forbidden door. Is this really what they still think of us? I started to wonder if the hotelier’s joke at my expense hadn’t been an entirely isolated incident.

The Irish education system tried to warn me. My history books had examples of how we were portrayed in British media in the 19^th century. In 1867 Punch magazine published a cartoon by John Tenniel called ‘The Fenian Guy Fawkes’ in which an Irish person was depicted as apish and hideous as he sat atop a barrel of gunpowder. Portrayals of our ancestors as simian-like creatures helped the British justify the terrible cruelty of colonisation. It’s a blueprint they would repeat around the world.

The echoes of Punch magazine could still be heard in the British comedy of the 1970s. Take the example of O’Reilly in Fawlty Towers, an incompetent Irish builder who Basil hires to carry out repairs around the hotel. Basil’s wife Sybil becomes so exasperated with his work that she says he ‘belongs in a zoo!’ Then she continues ‘he’s shoddy, he doesn’t care, he’s a liar, he’s incompetent, he’s lazy, he’s nothing but a half-witted, thick Irish joke!’ This was broadcast almost a century after Tenniel’s cartoon had been published. The medium had changed but the message was the same.

Sitcoms like Father Ted would eventually come along and invert the stereotypes to brilliant comic effect. Derry Girls is another recent example of Irish writers and performers creating comedy that is authentic, original and hilarious. Even as far back as the 1960s, Dubliner Dave Allen started to reclaim the narrative and was a pioneer of alternative comedy in the UK.

Even now though, old habits die hard. Amazon’s The Rings of Power was released in 2022 and contains the most cringe-inducing rendering of Irish people in the media in almost 200 years.

The producers made an earnest attempt to promote diversity in their casting process. There were Puerto Rican Elves, mixed-race Dwarves and everything in between. These decisions drew inevitable criticism from racists and Tolkien purists but no one can deny it was an audacious new vision of Middle-earth.

Unfortunately, as well intentioned as the show was, the producers still had one blind spot when it came to their own biases.

Someone decided the different peoples in the series should have a distinct regional accent. The Elves, the noblest beings in the land, of course were given dignified southern English voices. Next on the totem pole were the more rough-around-the-edges Men of Middle-earth who spoke with gruff northern English twangs.

One rung below them were the Dwarves, a group of angry and drunk little people whose manner of speech was undeniably Scottish.

The lowest of the low were the Harfoots. These are a species of mud-splattered and superstitious simpletons who had not evolved into proper Hobbits yet. Can you guess what accent they spoke with? Listening to their ridiculous sing-song Irish cadences, it was as if O’Reilly the builder had been reborn, barefoot and wide-eyed as he scurried around in the dirt of Middle-earth.

Even in this politically correct interpretation of Tolkien, some prejudices die hard. Typical Irish, indeed.

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An Irishman went in for a job on a building site. The foreman says to him ‘What’s your name?’

The Irishman replies ‘Paddy Mulligan’.

The foreman says ‘can you spell it?’

The Irishman responds ‘stick your job up your arse’.

That’s a gag told by the late British comic Bernard Manning. He was one of the UK’s most popular comics in the 1970s.

Manning had dozens of jokes about the Irish. The target was invariably a man called Paddy who had a heap of kids, worked on a building site, and was stupid to the point of having a learning disability.

His material about black and Asian people was much worse. The nation’s taste evolved with the rise of alterative comedy in the 1980s and comics like Manning stopped getting booked on TV. In 1995 he caused a public controversy when he was booked to perform at a policeman’s dinner and aimed racist punchlines at the only black officer in attendance.

‘Having a night out with nice white people?’ he quipped. ‘Isn’t it much better than swinging from trees?’

The world had changed around him but he’d stayed rooted in the bigoted working men’s club vernacular of the previous generation. He died in 2007.

Despite vanishing from television decades ago, Manning’s routines are now enjoying a resurgence on Instagram, Facebook and Tik Tok. Jokes using the N-word and P-word have been going viral to the delight of old and new fans.

Comedy like this is booming right now. Stand-up specials and roasts which use racist, sexist or transphobic material are doing huge numbers on platforms like Netflix. For people who felt alienated by what we might call the ‘woke-era’ of comedy, jokes like these feel genuinely transgressive and exciting.

This has happened before. Manning’s cohort were banished to the wilderness by the politically-correct comedy of comics like Ben Elton, Jo Brand and Rik Mayall who eschewed the bigotry of their predecessors.

The ‘right-on’ sensibilities of the new comedy establishment eventually gave way to comedians like Ricky Gervais, Sacha Baron Cohen and Jimmy Carr with their new brand of postmodern nastiness. Material about Irishmen and Pakistani people were out but lines about rape, gays and the disabled were very much back on the table.

Set against a backdrop of New Labour, Brit Pop and Lad Culture, the new offensive comedy was justified by a thin layer of irony. The argument ran essentially thus: unlike the working men’s club lot, these comedians had been to university and therefore couldn’t possibly believe the awful things that they said. When they wrote a gag about sexual assault, they were doing so with a postmodern flair. This is England, where a dark joke is only offensive if it’s told by a poor person.

The same comics who pushed back on political correctness are now thriving in the post-woke era. Take Carr, who is omnipresent on British television and has almost two million subscribers on YouTube. He’s recently reinvented himself as self-help guru, touring the right-of-centre podcast network and performing alongside Trump-supporting comics like Tony Hinchcliffe in the US.

Watching Carr’s comedy, it’s as if Manning had been reborn as a Cambridge graduate, reworked his material for the 21^st century, and had a botched face-lift.

Here’s a line from his 2019 special His Dark Materials.

‘No one ever mentions the thousands of gypsies murdered by the Nazis, because no one ever wants to talk about the positives’.

The joke came in a section of his show he called ‘career enders’. To take offence at material like this is to miss the point. Indeed, causing offence is the point. Shock humour doesn’t pretend to offer any insight into the human condition or broader society other than reflecting the prevailing prejudices of the day.

Rather than being a career ender, Carr’s routine generated the optimum amount of controversy to create buzz around what is an otherwise unremarkable comedy special. Roma and Sinti people are a tiny minority in the UK with a life expectancy 10 years lower than the broader population. The Commission for Racial Equality has described discrimination against gypsy, roma and traveller people as ‘the last respectable form of racism’. When a multi-millionaire mocks their slaughter on a major media platform, they simply aren’t powerful enough to do anything about it.

American corporations like Meta are far more likely to shadowban content that is critical of Israel’s genocide in Gaza than the hack one-liners peddled by the likes of Carr. If he was genuinely interested in being transgressive, he could have delivered his back catalogue of holocaust gags when he when he attended an event for the Israeli Embassy in the British Museum last year. Or better yet, he could have slagged off the Crown Prince when he gigged at the Riyadh Comedy Festival.

Now, that’s what I call a career ender.

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Disgraced 1980’s pop star Boy George released a song this week denying Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The song is called We Will Dance Again and it’s not very good. Even the pro-Israel newspaper the Telegraph conceded that the track ‘might not be his best’. Their journalists might turn a blind eye to the IDF’s crimes in Palestine but at least their ears still work.

His 1982 hit Do You Really Want to Hurt Me was a poor approximation of reggae that nevertheless became a UK number one. ‘White People Bastardizing Jamaican Music’ is a competitive field, from UB40’s insipid Can’t Help Falling in Love to Paris Hilton’s utterly bumbaklat Stars Are Blind. But George’s latest release might just be the worst white reggae song ever, combining AI song writing with sympathy for war criminals.

Lyrics include ‘You say genocide, I say war… When you’re attacked, that’s what the army’s for’. Personally, if I wanted to understand whether or Israel’s actions are genocidal in nature, I’d probably consult the UN commission’s inquiry on the subject. If I wanted to know how to rip-off black music while dressed like Beetlejuice, I’d certainly seek Boy George’s opinion.

Real name George Alan O’Dowd, he was born in Kent to an Irish immigrant family. His great uncle was an IRA volunteer. He fought in the Irish war of independence against the Black and Tans, a notoriously cruel paramilitary organization which would later be redeployed by the British government against the Palestinians. The irony of this seems to be lost on the former Culture Club front man, or perhaps he just doesn’t care.

Whatever your taste in music, this is not the kind of celebrity endorsement that Israel needs right now. He last made headlines in 2008 when he was convicted for false imprisonment after a male escort accused him of handcuffing him to a radiator and beating him with a metal chain.

If your government has been accused by multiple human rights groups for unlawfully detaining and torturing Palestinians, Boy George’s support is really not a good look.

That this is the best they can do speaks to the collapse in Israel’s global prestige since its onslaught in Gaza began. Though the occupation has been ongoing since the 60’s, social media has highlighted the plight Palestinians to the general public in a way that has been unfiltered and appalling real.

US public opinion in particular has drastically changed. Polling by Pew shows that the number of Americans with unfavourable views towards Israel has risen from 42% in 2022 to 60% in 2026. After decades of relative indifference, the speed at which ordinary people are questioning the narratives they’ve been told about the Middle East is remarkable.

Anti-Semitism is a scourge and it is rising. However it should be possible to show solidarity with our Jewish friends while also recognising that Israel’s appalling treatment of their neighbours must come to an end.

This nuance has been lost on people like Boy George. His manager has announced on Instagram that the singer has pulled out of the new London production of Jesus Christ Superstar.

Hopefully the time off will give him some time to reflect. The world has changed and no one in their right mind wants to be seen endorsing the IDF and its atrocities.

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It’s not easy being Irish in Britain when England are in the World Cup. A London pub is bleached in terrors. St. George’s flags pinned to the walls, the bloated faces diced with red crosses, the slurred chorus of football anthems.

Imagine being a Ewok trapped on the Death Star, sobbing quietly into your green fur while a hammered Darth Vader prepares to explode another planet. That is what it feels like.

A fight or flight response is triggered. In the same way that a cat can smell a storm, the Irish living in the UK could sense the coming of the World Cup this year in our bones. That’s why so many of us can be found hiding in trees during the games, mewling and eating mice.

Even your liberal English friends transform for 90 minutes. The sort you normally find sipping oat-milk lattes while whining about how Brexit has spoiled their dream of working as a ski instructor in France. But when the football is on, they iron a jersey and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the same brutes that used to bully them in school, united now in nationalist triumphalism. Something guttural is released from deep within. It’s like seeing their sex face. Corbyn on the streets, Farage between the sheets.

Perhaps English people would experience comparable levels of ick watching Ireland play in a Dublin pub, but our national team is so inept that they needn’t worry. Statistically, an English football fan is more likely to be eaten by a shark in Benidorm than watch Ireland play in the finals the World Cup.

On the rare occasion that we do even qualify, the dormant Irish soccer supporter is activated. Legions of wide-eyed fans emerge from the wilderness and move eastward towards the continent, like the Pauper’s Crusade in 1096 when delirious peasants marched on Jerusalem. The fevered enthusiasm comes not from an expectation of success but from a blind faith in the essential goodness of being Irish. The international press dote on the Irish fans, reporting on their good nature and acts of kindness. There is no aggression because qualifying has been its own reward.

Perhaps French football fans are as-bad or worse than England fans, but France didn’t colonise Ireland so our relationship with its flag is entirely different. If I see a St. George’s Cross hanging behind a bar, generational emotional trauma is triggered. But if I see a French tricolour hanging behind a bar, I think: I bet they’ll do a lovely quiche here.

The Euros in 2021 was especially tough on me. We were just emerging from Covid and like everyone else, I was a little emotionally fragile. As the tournament progressed past the group stages, I reassured myself that England would be eliminated soon. Then, as Southgate’s side kept advancing, a cold, wet feeling spread across my body as I realised that England might actually win this thing.

There was only one thing for it – I had to leave the country.

I booked flights home and retreated to my parent’s house on the Curragh. It was only at this safe distance that I felt I could watch the final. My father and I watched the game in silence as rain dashed the living room windows. I knew what was at stake. If England won, I’d probably never be able to return there. Boris Johnson was still Prime Minister, remember. The swell of bombastic jingoism would have been so strong that the streets of London would resemble a British version of The Purge.

When Italy scored the winning penalty, my anxiety gave way to a flood of relief. My father and I jumped to our feet, punched the air and embraced. It was as if Ireland had won, not Italy. I texted my English friends my condolences, but the truth was that I was delighted.

As the World Cup approached this year, that familiar sickly feeling in my stomach returned. It is at low moments like these that I look deep within myself and ask myself a simple question – What Would Terry Wogan Do (WWTWD)?

Like Sir Terry before me, perhaps the time has come to embrace my inner Brit. So this year, with England having made it to the quarter finals, I will daub my face in a white and red acrylic, swill a pint of Stella, and tell anyone who will listen about the deep spiritual connection I feel for Diana, the Princess of Wales. If there’s a lit flare nearby, I might even stick it between my buttocks. Behind my rictus smile I will remind myself – this will all be over soon. For another few years at least.

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Last week I received what’s called a ‘Community Guidelines’ violation on Tik Tok. It appears that an AI content moderator reviewed my video, decided that it was offensive, and took it down.

The exact criteria that my comedy routine breached is unclear, but I can only assume it’s because I referred to Keir Starmer as ‘Zionist Postman Pat’.

Now, far be it from me to question the sense of humour of a robot. But whether you’re a journalist, comedian or even just a regular person posting on social media, the line between content moderation and censorship is becoming increasingly blurred.

Conservatives have been complaining about ‘cancel culture’ for more than a decade now. The term was coined sometime in the mid 2010s to describe the phenomenon of public figures being publicly shamed online for their behaviour. This might include anything from a poor taste joke to sexual misconduct.

Liberals preferred to think of it ‘accountability culture’, whereby powerful people were held responsible for the terrible things that they’d done and said through a form of digital mob justice. Conservatives, scrambling to find their footing in the age of social media, decried the rise of a ‘woke mind virus’.

If ‘cancelling’ is indeed a virus, then Justine Sacco was patient zero.

The American communications executive was boarding a flight to South Africa in 2013 when she tweeted:

‘Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!’

The post had gone viral by the time she landed and her employer had already fired her.

Right-wing figures were especially vulnerable to accusations of homophobia, sexism and racism. A counter narrative emerged that accused liberal institutions of a co-ordinated conspiracy to repress free speech. So called ‘free speech absolutists’ developed a lucrative podcast industry which circumnavigated traditional media and monetized the alienation of a generation of men.

The reality is that censorship has long been the speciality of social conservatives. The Catholic Church maintained an Index of Forbidden books as far back as 1559. Ireland had blasphemy laws until January 2020 and today books with LGBTQ+ themes have been removed from some American schools.

Comedy has always been a flashpoint in the free speech debate. Lenny Bruce and George Carlin were both arrested on obscenity charges after stand-up sets in the 60s and 70s. More recently in the UK, Stewart Lee was pushed to the brink of bankruptcy when Christian groups campaigned against his musical Jerry Springer: The Opera due to its supposedly sacrilegious portrayal of Jesus.

Today a new generation of formerly liberal comics have switched sides. They claim that the left’s over-sensitivity around the use of slur words violates their right to free speech in the same way that the religious-right used to. Some even went as far to endorse Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election.

Both sides of the political spectrum have always tried to drown out the sound the other. Progressives happened to adapt to the internet age much quicker than their adversaries but conservatives have more than made up for lost time. Over in the US, the Trump administration has clamped down on freedom of expression by targeting student protestors, liberal media outlets and even the legal profession. Some of the comics who previously sucked up to Trump and his supporters are now sheepishly admitting their mistake. They were duped.

Here in the UK our Labour government has become no less censorious. Last summer it banned the protest group Palestine Action in a decision widely criticised by civil liberty campaigners and UN human rights experts. Since then it has applied an erratic scattergun approach to blocking the visas of foreign artists, journalists and activists whose presence they deem ‘not conducive to the public good’.

Unfortunately, the government’s criteria for what it considers conducive to the public good has not been clearly defined. This year it denied visas to various figures with widely different political views without ever explaining the thinking behind the bans.

Several far-right figures were blocked from speaking at Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom Rally in May. This included Valentina Gomez - a Colombian-American who has publicly burned the Quran with a flamethrower and vowed to ‘end Islam’ in Texas.

It also revoked the visas of Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur, two American political commentators who have been vocal critics of Israel. They had been scheduled to speak and the SXSW London festival and the Oxford Union.

Because the Home Office has not been explicit as to why these people had their visas cancelled, we can only assume that it considers the rhetoric of people like Gomez and Piker as being equally dangerous to the impressionable minds of the British public. Advocating for the mass deportation of Muslims from Western countries and calling out the genocide in Gaza are not two sides of the same coin, but this Labour government want us to believe that it is.

By failing to even try and satisfactorily explain the exact criteria behind the bans, the implication is that the government can block the visas of anyone who they don’t like.

A startling precedent is being set. If Nigel Farage is successful in his bid to become the next Prime Minister, a framework with which to stifle free speech will be ready-made for him to exploit. You don’t need to be a stand-up comedian to understand why that’s really troubling.

Ireland is boycotting the Eurovision this year as a protest against Israel’s inclusion.

RTE has chosen to air an episode of the sitcom Father Ted instead. Graham Linehan, the show’s writer, has called the decision anti-Semitic.

Linehan is one of our greatest living comedy writers. He’s also the ghoul that speaks if you ask a Ouija board if a trans woman is a woman. In recent years he’s disappeared down a social media wormhole and lost his career, his friends and his family along the way due to his virulent transphobia.

The episode in question is brilliant. It sees Dougal and Ted enter the song contest with a song called My Lovely Horse. The joke is that Ireland used to win the Eurovision so often that we decided to lose on purpose that year by sending in two priests.

I loved the Eurovision as a child. We were class at it back then.

The country was still a largely undeveloped, provincial island on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, but I felt immense pride to be Irish. Irish culture was cool, and I knew it.

Our rock bands, novelists and filmmakers were some of the most acclaimed in the world. I loved the Eurovision because we were particularly deadly at it.

1996 was the last time we walked away with the win.

The UK was robbed, in fairness. Gina G’s syrupy club banger Ooh Aah… Just A Little Bit had a triumphantly contagious quality which still endures in late-night dive bars to this day.

Striding onto the stage in Oslo wearing a short sequined dress and high heels, she sang and gyrated with the sexual confidence which defined the Britpop era.

Ireland’s entry went for an altogether different aesthetic. Draped in a virginal white gown and standing completely still, Eimear Quinn belted out folk ballad The Voice in what felt like a banshee-toned rebuke to the Brits.

While Gina G was accompanied by crotch-thrusting young wans, Quinn had trad musicians dressed like extras in an Irish-American fever dream. It was two years since Riverdance stole the show at Eurovision 1994, and the world still had an appetite for this sort of thing. It was 12 points all around and Ireland won for a record-setting 7th time.

I was seven and watched the show in my grandparent’s house in Roscommon.

My granddad had been a fruit importer – when he opened his business in the 1950s, many of his customers in the West of Ireland had never seen a banana before. He was the first man in town to own a TV, so neighbours would gather at the window to watch my mother and her siblings watch RTÉ.

Things had kicked on a bit by 1996, but the country was still a different planet from how it is today. We had a flair for the supernatural. When my mother packed us into the car for the long drive home to Kildare, my grandmother tearfully doused the windscreen in holy water, as if quenching some invisible flame.

What I couldn’t have understood then was that Ireland’s cultural currency was underwritten at least in part by the perception that the island was a violent, tragic place.

Quinn’s victory was set against the backdrop of the Troubles and the sympathy felt for the Irish would was not dissimilar to the goodwill felt towards Palestinians by many of us today. With lyrics like “I am the voice of your history… Answer my call and I’ll set you free”, you could be forgiven for thinking that Quinn’s song had a political undertone. The IRA had bombed Canary Wharf only two months previously.

Eurovision ’96 was probably the peak of ‘Ireland’ being shorthand for ‘dangerous and interesting’.

By the time Richard Gere played a Republican sniper in the atrocious The Jackyl the following year, our reputation for being sexy and sad was starting to diminish. The Good Friday Agreement was signed shortly after and the world moved on.

On Saturday I will enjoy watching Father Ted and gorge on the nostalgia. Not that anyone in their right mind would want to turn the clock back. Ireland was a country that endured centuries of sectarian conflict but is peaceful and prosperous today. I hope that the children in Palestine will someday grow up to know what that feels like.

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Do you ever look at a friend trapped in a toxic relationship and think: you know you’re allowed to leave, right? That’s how Ireland feels when it looks at Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. They could do so much better.

Being a single isn’t always easy. There are lonely Sunday afternoons when we look across the Irish Sea and think about the good times. The British built some nice buildings during the Georgian period, did they not? But then we think about the centuries of economic, cultural and humanitarian abuse and remember that it’s better to be alone than staying with a coloniser.

Ireland has its problems but now they are of our own making. When bad decisions are made they are made by an eijit in Dublin and not a flute in London. Our politicians may be bastards but at least they are our bastards.

There are local elections coming up in the UK. Polls suggest that centre-left nationalist parties will take power in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland simultaneously. This has never happened before. The result could be electric.

David Cameron – a cursed wax-figure who escaped Madame Tussauds and performed sex acts with hogflesh – narrowly defeated the Scottish National Party’s campaign for Scottish Independence in 2014. Keir Starmer is in a much weaker position today than the Tories were then. Putting down one independence movement is one thing but trying to put down three at once is quite another.

Sinn Fein became the largest party in the Belfast assembly last time around and are on course to maintain their position. They want a poll on Irish reunification by 2030. The SNP were beaten last time around but are poised to bounce back. Meanwhile in Cardiff, Plaid Cymru are hoping to topple Welsh Labour for the first time.

John Swinney, the SNP leader, has promised to work with Sinn Fein and Plaid Cymru to break up the union. The three parties have much they could collaborate on, like taxation, currency and re-joining the European Union. This must be an appalling thought for Westminster. Like an abusive father finding out that his wife and two children are plotting their escape.

It didn’t need to be this way. The Scots have already bottled it once before. Uncertainty over the economy was enough to make voters there think twice. Remaining part of the UK promised stability if not happiness. Sometimes a divorce is just too expensive to go ahead with.

The English rewarded Scotland for its loyalty by voting to leave the European Union the two years later. Even the most humourless highlander would have to admit that it was a brilliant joke, however cruel. Salt was rubbed in their wounds with the subsequent ascension of Boris Johnson to Number 10. While the average English person has a perverse acceptance of the British caste system, Johnson’s buffoonish posh-boy antics were too much for most people in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Here’s the reality: if a majority of English people want something, then it really doesn’t matter what the Welsh, Scottish or Irish think. Britain’s Brexit calamity and the virulent English jingoism which fuelled it has left the UK’s other nations with no choice but to seek radical solutions of their own.

The shifting politics of Wales is especially curious. They’ve done a much better job of reviving their national tongue than Scotland or Ireland but have long been essentially disinterested in independence from the UK. A majority voted for Brexit and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK are polling well.

Farage’s xenophobic world view should give them some pause for thought. The question of who is ‘native’ to the island of Britain really depends on how far back you start the clock. The ancestors of the modern Welsh were ethnically distinct group from the Anglo Saxons. Ancient Celtic languages were spoken in Britain long before the arrival of the invaders with their peculiar Germanic language.

You know what the English are like. Arriving on boats, not learning the language, out breeding the locals. Perhaps its time that the Welsh take back control.

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Here’s something they didn’t teach us in school — being Irish is sexy.

People have an almost involuntary erotic reaction to our wan complexions and the lilt in our voices. Who knows why? Perhaps it’s because a generation were exposed to Westlife and Boyzone at too young an age and had their sexual preferences warped.

We drink too much and have low self-esteem. Anyone who has ever been chatted up by an Irish man knows what I’m talking about. The slurred speech, the pained facial expressions. You can’t tell if he’s coming-on to you or if he’s having a stroke and asking for help.

Ireland has sex tourism now, which is ridiculous. Travelling to Ireland for the sex is like going to Thailand for St. Patrick’s Day. You’re going to be disappointed. If you ask an Irish man for a ‘happy ending’, he’ll tell you the story of when Queen Elizabeth died. And then he’ll cum.

The boom in our sexual currency makes no sense. It’s like we’re living in an alternative reality, Planet Bizarre. Where dogs walk humans, the sky is green, and freckled skin is irresistible to women.

My partner is from Malaga. The wives and girlfriends of my Irish mates are all French, Italian or Spanish. Sometimes we pose for group photos and it looks like a group of European models are volunteering with a men’s mental health charity.

I didn’t realize how limited my dating options had been back home.

In Iceland, at least they have a dating app that prevents people from accidentally hooking up with their cousins.

It was developed by a group of students eager to take advantage of the sexual opportunities offered by internet dating, but who were conscious of the incest risk that comes with casual encounters on an island. I’m not aware of similar technology in Ireland. I’d like to think that’s because our family records were destroyed in the burning of the Public Record Office in 1922, not because of a more blasé attitude towards inbreeding.

This isn’t a problem in London. Nobody knows you or who you were before you got here. Young people from all over the world move here to transform their lives. The city throbs with their restless energy, the low hum of their yearning. Lost souls anxiously scrolling. Lit screens in darkened bedrooms, rectangles of light suspended in the dark.

It’s probably not a coincidence I ended up with a Spanish girl. My attempts to date the English can largely be filed under ‘romantic misadventure’.

Being fetishized is one thing but being stereotyped is another. The English assume all Irish people are simple country fools. It doesn’t matter if you accent is West of Ireland or South County Dublin – all they hear is ‘Paddy’.

Their first question was always the same. ‘Do you come from Northern or ‘Southern’ Ireland?’ They’d never use the word ‘Republic’, because to do so would be acknowledge that Britain still lives under the yoke of a magic family chosen by God to rule in the middle ages.

Finding the right person takes time. But the overabundance of potential partners in London means that people can become disposable. That includes you.

Making yourself emotionally in a culture like that is tough. But look, people definitely dig the accent. If you can’t get a date in Ireland, my humble advice would be to just leave.

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My first therapist was a bit of a boor. Like if Sigmund Freud has sustained a head injury playing rugby.

I was 19 and struggling with low self-esteem. He told me that I should have been sent to boarding school and that I needed a girlfriend.

Is this what psychotherapy is, I wondered? Getting bullied by an aging jock in his wife’s conservatory?

My problems got worse. A bleary-eyed GP in my university medical centre recommended anti-depressants. Her caveat was that if I took the pills, I would need to stop drinking alcohol. So, I did what any rational 22-year-old would do. I rejected the medication and went to see a hypnotherapist instead.

The appeal of hypnotherapy is obvious. There’s no recounting of painful memories, no medicine with unpleasant side effects. Someone else does all the work for you. They put you to sleep, and you supposedly wake up cured. That’s what I wanted.

My hypnotherapist didn’t ask me to talk about my feelings. He just needed to know what my problem was, and a cheque. “I struggle with my nerves, but I want to be a stand-up comedian”, I told him sheepishly. “Stand-up comedy? Tough profession” he said, polishing his hypnotic clock. Then he put me under.

I had wanted to be a comic since I was a little boy. Whenever a comedian appeared on the Late Late Show, I’d sit as close to the television set as I could as if I could absorb some of their power through the electric crackles screen. I loved all comedians – from the D’Unbelieavables to Tommy Tiernan.

To my mind, they were special people sent from the heavens to make us all laugh and feel good. It seemed impossible that I would ever even try it.

Then I joined my university’s comedy society and a few of us decided we’d give it a go. The others were studying drama and seemed impossibly confident. I pretended that I was, too. But on the night of our debut performance in a dive bar in Dublin’s inner city, I thought I might puke.

Pint in a hand and covered in a disquieting patchwork of sweat stains, I stumbled onto the stage. I told my jokes in a rictus of terror that the audience confused for offbeat deadpan, and the laughs rolled in from the back of the room like a wave. I have not felt a high like it to this day.

But the rush faded and the terror never went away. Butterflies 30 minutes before stage time is healthy, but I was waking up in a damp panic two months before a gig. No one could live like that, so I quit.

That was until I tried hypnosis. I can’t tell you for sure that it worked, but I can tell you that a few weeks later I tried stand-up again and the paralysing stage fright was gone.

Probably it was a combination of getting older, the positive affirmations the hypnotherapist purred into my ear, and a feeling of wanting to get my money’s worth from the sessions.

Today I still struggle with anxiety. But a combination of meditation and CBT exercises has turned stand-up into a productive and joyful exercise. Now I’m on my first international tour with my show ‘Fresh Prince of Kildare’. In a few weeks I’ll perform the biggest shows of my life at the Leicester Square Theatre in London and the Ambassador in Dublin.

I don’t know where my hypnotherapist is now. I’d like to think he’s helping people to quit smoking, or performing on a cruise ship, or saving the world from Black Magic. I hope he knows that when it comes to me at least, his work here is done.

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