In Iceland, they have a dating app that prevents people from accidentally hooking up with their cousins.
The app was developed by a group of students eager to take advantage of the sexual opportunities offered by internet dating, but who were conscious of the incest risk that comes with casual encounters on an island.
Galway is about a quarter the size of the Icelandic population, but Ireland’s provincial cities and small towns have not seen the demand for similar technology. I’d like to think this is perhaps because our family records were destroyed in the burning of the Public Record Office in 1922, not because of a more blasé attitude towards inbreeding.
Dating in London made me realise just how limited my options had been back home.
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Setting the search radius on Tinder to 3km gave me hundreds of thousands of potential partners. If I set my search radius to 3km in Kildare, I’d listlessly swipe through the familiar catalogue of neighbours, family friends and off-duty shepherds before inevitably giving up and taking the dog for another walk across the Curragh.
As soon as the pandemic ended, I made my move. Young people move to London from all over the world hoping to meet new people and change their lives. As long as you speak English, you’re a local. Being from somewhere else isn’t especially interesting, but being Irish is definitely an advantage.
Here’s something they didn’t teach us in school — being Irish is sexy.
I have yet to find a compelling justification for this. People appear to have an almost involuntary erotic reaction to our freckled, wan complexions and agrarian tendencies. The best I can come up with is that a generation were exposed to the likes of Boyzone, Westlife and the Corrs at a young age and had their sexual preferences warped.
Discovering that the Irish people are your thing must be a terrible land. For the most part, the Irish in London try not to over-think our unreasonable carnal powers. London is still England, however, and class bleeds into everything, even the sexual marketplace. It takes a while to get used to. It’s not uncommon to see a profile with “No Tories” at the top of a person’s bio.
Again, being Irish can be an advantage when navigating the peculiarities of the British romantic caste system. Their ignorance of our country is such that you can completely reinvent yourself, if you so wish. Nobody knows what school you went to, what your parents did for a living, or whether you were any use at Gaelic football.
They cannot distinguish between the regional lilts to our accents — all they hear is “Paddy”. There is, however, awareness among some that the Northern Irish accent is incomprehensible, and occasionally an English person will smile graciously and congratulate me for not having it.
Every so often I’ll be asked if I come from Northern Ireland or “Southern” Ireland, but they’ll never use the word Republic, because to do so would be to acknowledge that Britain still lives under the yolk of a magic family chosen by God to rule in the middle ages.
Back home, my accent and general demeanour are identifiably middle-class. The relative ease with which I have navigated my life can largely be attributed to stable family life and the broadly reliable education I was afforded in early life. But, in England, people hear my voice and assume that I emerged from the soil like cabbage, wiping muck from my misshapen skull as I blinked uncomprehendingly at the sun.
I don’t disabuse them of this vision of my origin story. This is a nation divided by bitter social divisions, and any perceived disadvantage of mine, real or imagined, is to be exploited.
Though my parents are thoughtful, kind people, that is not what I tell the English. As far as they are concerned, my poor mother and father are simple country fools, whose ham-knuckled grasp I had to escape to pursue my dreams in the big city.
The obvious downside to the over-abundance of single people in a city like this is that people become disposable — and this includes you.
Finding the right person takes time, effort and vulnerability. That isn’t any easier in east London than it is in south Kildare. But people definitely dig the accent. If you can’t get a date in Ireland, my humble advice would be to just leave.
- Peter Flanagan lives in Hackney, London, and works as a comedian all over Europe.
- If you live overseas and would like to share your experience with Irish Times Abroad, email abroad@irishtimes.com with a little information about you and what you do.
