“You’re Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, you’re supposed to be a role model for our children!”
Ross O’Carroll-Kelly is one of the most-loved fictional characters in modern Ireland with the stereotypically posh Dublin man striking a chord with people all over the country.
The creation by Paul Howard has been a roaring success with the book series as a whole shifting more than 1.3 million books.
Howard appeared on Ireland Unfiltered with Dion Fanning this week to discuss his career as a journalist and the creation and enduring popularity of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly.
He even told a story of how he was confronted in Brown Thomas by a woman who claimed her son had learned a very rude word from reading his books.
You can read the full story below.
Paul: I heard a woman in Brown Thomas once say, ‘How dare you!’ I just felt my shoulders go like this. She was talking to me actually and I had written something, I’d written – actually it wasn’t anything specific I’d written.
She told me her son called her a name and she was holding me responsible. ‘I want a word with you’, that strangulated, adenoidal, South Dublin voice, ‘I want a word with you’. I just froze and I looked over my shoulder and she was talking to me and she said, ‘my son called me this name’.
I asked her what the name was and he called her a ‘fuckpig’. I said I have never ever used that word. I’ve never written that word in my life, I might in the future but I’ve never. She said I’m blaming you for the attitude that caused him to call me that, reading your books.
So I looked behind me and the escalator was there so I just kind of stepped onto the escalator so I’m suddenly going away from her and she shouted up the escalator, ‘You’re Ross O’Carroll Kelly, you’re supposed to be a role model for our children’.
You can watch the interview in full below.
Ireland Unfiltered, brought to you in partnership with Carlsberg Unfiltered, will be available everywhere you get your podcasts and on YouTube every Tuesday.
