Colm O'Regan: My kids are dressing up as a ghost and Minnie-Mouse vampire. We can’t be trendsetters every year

Forget the vampires. Why not send your child out as the Abhartach, an Irish bad spirit. Or Balor of the evil eye

Colm O'Regan. Picture: Moya Nolan

It may be too late for this advice. Your child may have picked out their costume by now. It’ll be a ghost or vampire or pirate or something recognisable. Maybe it’ll be from a TV show that they really shouldn’t be watching and now the secret’s out. Your five-year-old arrives at neighbours’ doors dressed as Tommy Shelby from Peaky Blinders telling a surprised Noreen Twomey “This is the day we become respectable, but first we do the dirty work.”

Although it’s still probably better than pirates. I don’t know who they have doing their PR, actually I do it’s Johnny Depp. But pirates have got a relatively easy time reputation-wise. Given they threw people overboard or enslaved them, they’ve still got away with just being labelled as nothing more than rambunctious swashbucklers. No one would dress up as a slaver or overseer unless they are currently running for office in the American Republican party.