Séamas O'Reilly: I’ll never forget the first time I met someone who knew Prince Harry

It was like someone saying they’d studied with Ronald McDonald, or played rugby with the Statue of Liberty

Séamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

I’ll never forget the first time I met someone who knew Prince Harry. It was 2004, freshly installed in Dublin, where I’d come for college. Aside from the many other wonders I experienced during this time, it was also my first experience of meeting rich English people. It was, come to think of it, the first time I’d ever met rich Irish people too, but they don’t feature in this story, so I’ll leave that topic for another day.

At a house party, a few of us were evincing the then-not-particularly-controversial opinion that Prince Harry seemed like a bit of an arse. I think it was in the context of him wearing a Nazi uniform to a party, but we, the dozen or so Northern Irish people with whom I palled around, were surprised to find this opinion shared by the poshest guy we had ever met. “Yeah” he agreed, albeit for entirely different reasons; “he slept with my girlfriend”.