Caroline O'Donoghue: It boggles my mind now, to think about the stuff that was advertised to us but that we didn’t have
I’ve been living in London for almost 10 years, and as a result, most of my friends are English. Many of them were born in London, or grew up on its perimeter, and so I’ve heard lots of stories about their childhoods at the centre of everything.
I find it fascinating. When so much of the adolescent experience is about feeling uncool and provincial, what is it like to grow up two miles away from a club where famous people are getting papped? What’s it like to go to school with the children of celebrities?
What’s it like to hear that your favourite band are playing the Palladium next Friday, and then to simply just ask your mum to take you? No planning buses and trains to Dublin, no begging for money for the hostel and spending money when you got there.
But there are moments when I find it quite hard. Particularly with friends who, for all intents and purposes, were very similar to me as teenagers. Kids who were creative and dreamy, but couldn’t funnel that creativity into being good at school. I know people who, quite casually, entered poetry competitions at 15 and then were invited by the BBC to read their poems on the radio. I know a woman who wrote a play as a teenager, entered it into the Edinburgh Fringe festival as part of a youth programme.
Not only did she put that play on, but she also met a bevy of quite important playwrights, who she kept in contact with her whole adult life. There is a certain kind of London childhood that is swimming in possibilities like this. Competitions and special festivals, chaired and judged by genuinely famous artists, some of whom you get to meet. Some of whom stay in touch.
I know lots of Irish people who are angry about the British, politically angry, and who avoid being friends with them. I also know lots of people who are angry about the wealthy, the posh, or even just the middle-class, and avoid their company too. I don’t mind either group. I am a pretty passive, cheerful person, and no one can help what they are born with. But I find myself getting irritated and impatient when I hear these kinds of stories.
“Well, we’d all have loved that,” I snap, unfairly. “We’d all have loved to have our Saturday stage school scouted by RADA.”
It’s in these moments that I get angry at the inherent provinciality of Ireland. Again, this is unfair. I had lots of lovely things, growing up in Cork. There was no class or hobby I wasn’t allowed to join. I went to a Saturday drama school, was dropped off at art classes at the Triskel.
I looked for things to enter, and used the library to see what was possible. But I remember the distinct feeling of repeatedly running into brick walls. Everything that felt prestige, everything that had a budget, everything that felt like it could take me somewhere, always came with the same disclaimer: open to applicants in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Not available in ROI.
If I were to ever write a memoir, it would be called .
Even the local contests, the ones for aspiring young Irish writers, felt so crowded and bottle-necked with entrants that it seemed useless to get involved. It was also impossible not to notice that a certain type of 'Irish-y' story was always chosen for the winner. I had a friend who won a lot of these competitions. He used to joke about it at parties. “Oh, I used to just bang on about the land and talk about delf,” he said. “It was a nice little earner.”
It boggles my mind now, to think about the stuff that was advertised to us but that we didn’t have. The smallest, stupidest things: ASDA, or Orange mobile, or Pizza Hut. I always wonder about this: why did these advertisers pay for Irish distribution, when we didn’t have so many of the things they were selling us?
All of the teen magazines I read were made in Britain, so the teen culture that was accessible and ordinary to the British reader felt removed and alien to me: playing ‘netball’, calling your knickers your ‘pants’, having a ‘snog’. It added to an overall sensation that we were in the dark, not thought of or wondered about. We were in a state of always watching the British, but of never being watched back.
But the restrictions of 90s Ireland also provided moments of huge joy. I remember vividly the first time I had pizza out of a delivery box. The Domino’s Pizza in Douglas had just opened and it made us crazy. Pizza up until that point had been a sorry affair: thick, stodgy ones out of a petrol station freezer, the cheese coming clean off the top and burning your lip. Delivery box pizza was something glamorous: something the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had, something the rich family in ate.
One of the most legendary fights ever had in the O’Donoghue household came the second or third time we were allowed to order a pizza. My brother Rob was told to call Domino’s, and he ordered pepperoni, despite my other brother Shane hating it. When the pizza arrived and the box was lifted, Shane’s face went the colour of the much longed-for marinara sauce. He made for Rob, and Rob bolted up the stairs and locked himself into our parents' room. Shane hammered on the door, consumed with rage. “THIS IS THE WORST THING,” he yelled. “THE WORST THING YOU CAN DO TO A PERSON.”
There was definitely less to do as an Irish teenager, and that frustrated me. But I also didn’t experience something my London friends often do: the sense that they could have done more, but didn’t. The fact that Lily Allen and Kate Nash were doing extraordinary things, so why weren’t they?
Perhaps it’s best then, that I was where I was: doing nothing, watching everything, and waiting for the next Domino’s pizza-related meltdown.
