They say that every reality teevee show has to have an Irish person to bring both common sense and a sleeves-rolled-up ethic to the work and play. Maybe so. For sure, Irish people win an awful lot of reality popularity contests.

Quite why we’re still so flavoursome is a mystery. And worryingly, it may only be amongst the British. After all, the Irish are also the second most unpopular guests in many Spanish resorts after our near neighbours. Well, we look like them, we drink like them, we fight like them and we vomit like them too.
But we also do the celebrity thing pretty well and in 2004, tired and tacky as it might seem, celebrity just defied all the gods and grew again. It has now become self-perpetuating. Like some strange yeast it’s wafting and puffing out everywhere. Neither morbid nor benign, it simply is.
Public life is an aggregation of everyone’s fifteen minutes of fame. Yours too. We’re exhorted to ‘celebrate’ many things these days. Why not this?