‘Cool Eire’ puts the sham in shamrock

In 1902, a new short story appeared in Harper’s Monthly, written by the English author WW Jacobs. The story was a horror, in which a family – Mr and Mrs White, and their son Herbert – visit a friend who served with the British army in India. Over dinner, the friend shows them a mummified monkey’s paw. The paw has been cursed, he says. It will grant the holder three wishes, but each wish will also incur awful consequences as a punishment for meddling with fate. Today the story’s title, The Monkey’s Paw, has become in itself an allegory, a cautionary life mantra that says: be careful what you wish for.

You might, for instance, as the characters in the book do, wish for lots of money, but find that receiving it means it comes as a result of a bereavement. Or you might, if you were an Irish woman living in England, wish that being Irish was considered cool, only to discover that as a result of that finally happening, you are subsequently living in hell.

Once upon a time – the time being the year I moved to London – it was not considered “cool” to be Irish. Being Irish in London, or in England, was something to endure, a skill set that required you to be able to laugh heartily when men from the home counties mimicked your accent with affection and limited success – and in disbelief that this could be considered offensive. Nobody listened to Irish music, ate Irish food, or visited Irish places that weren’t the Giant’s Causeway. Knowledge of Ireland and the people within it was minimal at best. Once my flatmate asked me if they needed to get euros out before they went to Derry for the weekend.

And yet, years later, the monkey’s paw has curled its finger. Irishness is cool. It is veritably chic. It is omnipresent. Many of he capital’s busiest and most vibrant bars – the Devonshire in Soho, Finsbury Park’s Faltering Fullback – are Irish pubs. The phenomenon of the spice bag has transcended its humble, Dublin-based origins and gentrified itself at English street food markets and small-plates restaurants (costing minimum £9). Guinness is so popular as a drink and a pastime (in which men in their twenties, named Seb or Hugo, try to drink enough of the pint to split the “G” in Guinness exactly in half) that late last year London endured a drought of the black stuff. Pubs rationed it and put up signs advertising their other, less Irish stouts, instead.

Now, with the Guinness rivers safely flowing once again, England can look ahead to a particularly Irish summer. Irish musical acts headline festivals and dominate headlines, from Fontaines DC and Kneecap to CMAT and even second-generation dad-rockers Oasis. Ahead of their reunion, the Gallagher brothers have been keen to emphasise their Irish roots (their mother Peggy is from Mayo, their dad is from Meath). Noel has been spotted at Kneecap gigs and often talks about how his first exposure to music was the Irish rebel songs he heard in working men’s clubs around Manchester as a child. “We are Irish, me and Liam,” he said last year. “There is no English blood in us … Oasis could never have existed, been as big, been as important, been as flawed, been as loved and loathed, if we weren’t all predominantly Irish.”