Celebrity Culture

The traditional Irish approach to seeing celebrities is to ignore them. Partly because we respect their privacy, partly because, as a friend of mine said, “I wouldn’t give them the soot of it.”

I’m not sure whether these days are going but, as the Princess pointed out to me, I would still prefer to give a celebrity the cold shoulder than to pay him or her any attention. I’m not sure that’s still true for everyone, but perhaps.

There’s probably a reason for that. Laura Kennedy an Irish Times columnist who covers living in Australia, philosophy and make up (eclectic) had a beautiful piece recently about Tom, her little nephew in Limerick, who has special needs.

In Ireland, we value conformity. It is central to the Irish political and social project, stemming from a time when uniformity around collective identity was a key tool in combatting imperialism and cultural erosion. That had its benefits. We live in the legacy of some of its drawbacks.

You can’t wear a trench coat to the pub without your friends making Blade Runner references. We like people to fit in. We like to make it clear that we notice when they don’t, in both small, silly ways and larger, more serious ones. It’s a feature of our culture and for people like Tom, it has a higher cost than for the rest of us.

I think that’s probably true.

It’s also maybe why people are in general so friendly. Recently I saw the following (for me anyway) second tier, um, celebrities on the street: Brian O’Driscoll, Michael McDowell and the former archbishop of Dublin. To clarify they were not together. Each of them had a familiar face but not one I could immediately place so I went on the assumption that they were acquaintances of mine whom I had forgotten (a sadly all too familiar experience) and went in for the big hello. Each of them greeted this random stranger with a cheery hello back. It was only after I had passed them in each case that I realised that they were mildly well-known people who were strangers to me.

I have a friend who many years ago did something similar with her then TD (member of parliament) who was also a Minister. He cut her dead. She realised who he was a bit later and never voted for him again. His political career is now long over and although, one assumes, not solely due to this encounter, I don’t imagine it helped.

I went to an Argentinian restaurant recently for the first time (nice, surprisingly low on steak but containing real Argentinian customers saying “sho” and asking for limonada) and I thought I recognised my waitress. “Did I see you doing Irish language stand up?” I asked her. She confirmed that I had done and I told her she was great which she was. I thought, though, that she was a bit mortified about supplementing her income in this way (but, honestly, surely everyone knows that the big money isn’t in Irish language stand up?). Anyway I wish I’d just stuck to my guns and politely pretended I’d never seen her before in my life.