Irishology is my new favourite non-coffee table coffee table book.
It makes me happy. Finally, a book that pays homage to Irish interests, products, characteristics and institutions as varied as TCP, Junior C Football, crisps, Glenroe and, shudder, a bad pint.
Written by Ronan Moore, it’s a hell of a lot of fun.
Who doesn’t want to flick from the proper way to eat crisps to the best way of making a decent bacon and cabbage?
This is the kind of book for anyone who has ever been asked the question, “Who said Mass?”
For anyone who has ever had to switch over to the news at 9pm under fear of decapitation.
For those sufferers of a severed knee, a broken eye socket or a sudden dose of the plague, and the only answer is to dab some TCP on there and, “you’ll be grand, for feck’s sake.”
This section on Black Pudding perfectly nails what it’s like to have the world’s tastiest, yet most disgusting (when you think about it), foods as a breakfast staple.
We are a proud country. From beating Germany in the soccerball to France in the handball, we love our sport.
However, nothing rattles the affections of the Irish psyche like Junior C Football and those lads that make a dressing room smell seven shades worse than a sewer pipe after a Guinness festival.
This book has everything. Bosco, Turf Fires, Wet Rain (between a mist and drizzle, yet soaks you to the feckin’ bones), Whiskey, Hot Whiskey, The Late Late Toy Show, Shifting, Batch Bread and many, many more explained and dissected and rubbished and praised.
It’s the perfect book for this dreaded affliction that is the state of being Irish. Oh, and ‘The State Of’ gets its own section too.
Irishology will be published by Gill & Macmillan on Friday 16th October 2015, priced at €10.99.
LISTEN: You Must Be Jokin’ with Aideen McQueen – Faith healers, Coolock craic and Gigging as Gaeilge
