Newsmakers

Irish comic Andrew Stanley is helping to lead the charge alongside JOE for the Irish Cancer Society race and in his honour, here are five facts that you may not know about him.

The young comic is aboard ESB Electric Team B yellow cab alongside JOE editor Shane Breslin, Katie van Buren (star of RTE show 'Juice') and driver Liz Cotter from Cobh in Cork as they seek to raise funds for the charity.

Yet while his work today proves that he's a good soul at heart, here are five more facts that you may not have known about Andrew:

He was an Air Scout.

That's right, Andrew was once part of that old institution but with a little twist. Sadly, there was no camping in the woods for him, nor was he hunting bears or fishing.

Instead, it was all about walking along runways, sitting in cockpits and getting the numbers of planes as they landed at the side of the airport - while trying to avoid all the dirty perverts who hung out there. At the side of the airport. Not in the scouts.

He is colour blind when looking at reds and greens

One in ten men are colour blind and Andrew is part of that lucky 10%. I say lucky because he regularly gets asks things like "What colour is this? What colour is that?"

Turns out he wasn't able to become a pilot as a result of being colour blind, which sucks as it's what he wanted to do more than anything. As you can tell because why else would someone want to become an air scout?

He has the most protestant of names and birthdays

That's right. Andrew Stanley couldn't sound more British if he tried. Oh wait, actually his middle name is William. And he was born of the twelfth of July. Done.

He is allergic to raw onions

Apparently onions have a lot of sulphur in them and Andrew can't handle that stuff. It makes his head ready to explode. But cook that bad boy up and he has no problems at all as all the sulphur is burnt off. Science, eh? It's brilliant.

He used to have a perm

Back in the days when people make fashion mistakes, Andrew was too busy for all that malarkey. That's because he was busy making hairstyle mistakes instead. When asked to participate in a hair modelling event once he replied in typical Irish style, "Yeah, sure why not?!" So many reasons why not Andrew... so many reasons.

Andrew is aboard the Team B yellow cab for the Irish Cancer Society race and you can follow JOE's updates on our live tracker here.

ESB Electric Ireland have this morning announced that they will donate an extra 10k for each charity (ISPCC, the Irish Cancer Society and Concern) if the team hits 25,000 tweet today so please hammer home the #ESBElectricIrelandTeamB hashtag over on Twitter when you get the chance.