Colm O'Regan: Joining the Dripsey GAA lottery could save my life
Irish Examiner columnist, writer and comedian Colm O'Regan.
The Koreans. A great bunch of lads. Especially when it comes to their dystopic horror shows on Netflix. I don’t know how they manage it, but they just seem to get right to the heart of the human condition. A few months ago, it was the zombie series Kingdom.
The undead stalked mediaeval Korea and watching their inevitable spread through the slums and palaces of the cities got me thinking. Thinking about whether the Dripsey Tidy Towns would grant me refuge in the event of a similar apocalypse in Ireland.
Would I be allowed past the flaming zombie-proof barricades into the village of my birth if I was fleeing from the hell-hole of Dublin? Had I paid my dues? Coincidentally or not, a reminder for the their - sorry, I mean our- GAA lotto arrived into my inbox shortly after the Season 2 finale. You best believe I paid that in full.
It doesn’t matter that I haven’t won a cent yet. If it secures me a place to wait out the end of the world, then I’m a winner in the Lotto of Life.
This time Squid Game has me thinking deeply too. Thinking about the lengths I’d go to save my own life when there was nowhere to run. Who would I betray?
I don’t want to give away too much of the plot of Squid Game. Although the title is a bit of misdirection so far. We are in episode 6 and so far the seafood element is definitely underplayed. What we definitely have is a Fierce Bad Fella running an evil island where poor or heavily indebted people play children’s games for their lives.
But what’s more interesting is the world it creates. Although it’s a game, it swiftly takes on the appearance of a tightly controlled country with a totalitarian state that is committed to an ideology but also there is corruption and people making money on the side. And the victims are not blameless because they can do bad things to save themselves. I know, right?
Imagine that happening in the real world! Okay, it’s not that hard. But if you have to see this in your mind’s eye, rather than just look out the window, then it’s a reminder that most of us, especially in this rich country in this rich part of the world, are very lucky indeed.
What would you do to save your own skin? Who would you betray to their death? It’d be easy enough to hand over a stranger. Don’t we already indirectly treat strangers - the ones who make cheap stuff for us to eat/wear/play with - badly? But what about a stranger right in front of you. And I don’t mean the person in the car who didn’t indicate. Someone in the flesh.
What about people you know? Have you worked out a priority list? My first duty is to my family but after that, what order of Cousinhood or friendship becomes acceptable to betray.
(There are no cousins in Squid Game but it would be almost inevitable in any Irish version that you’d arrive in and by game two you’d have established every other contestant’s connection to you.) It is the essence of good TV to make you do a bit of quandary-pondering. And even better if it’s Korean.
Because of my shameful lack of knowledge of Korean film and TV stars, I don’t spend the whole show distracted by famous faces going “Hup there’s Yer Man” and “Is that Herself?”.
So without that distraction, it’s just me and my wife looking at desperate people on the telly who have horrible decisions to make. Then we look at one another to see who would betray who. Three episodes left. We’ll need to binge-watch Nationwide afterwards to decompress.
