Séamas O'Reilly: My story of ketamine and Mary McAleese has done me very well

Before Séamas O’Reilly starts his new weekly column in Weekend, he sat down with Jen Stevens to talk about that Twitter thread, the border and what he loves about home

Sun, 17 Jul, 2022 - 18:00

Jen Stevens

Séamas O’Reilly is a journalist, a writer and the author of what is possibly the greatest Twitter thread of all time. You’ll know it, of course, the story of a young man high on ketamine who had to serve Mary McAleese drinks at an official function. It has everything, tension, fear, pace, pathos, relief and humour.

So much humour. If you need a laugh today, and who doesn’t, please go reread it.

Got my days wrong and ended up alone in a room with my boss and the President of Ireland while I was on ketamine. https://t.co/gSjPY8WjKL
— The author, Séamas O'Reilly (@shockproofbeats) May 3, 2018

It’s obviously the first thing Séamas and I discuss during our lengthy chat.

“I mean, I love that ketamine story, it’s great and I’m not in any way churlish about it. I hope it follows me to my grave because it’s done me very well. I reread it every once in a while because it does it have a second life, it’s actually had a fourth, fifth and sixth life, it’s on its 20th life now. About a week or two ago it had another run and was shared all over the place again.

“The funny thing that happens now is that every single book event that I’ve done, and I’ve done like, I don’t know, about 20 of them now, there’s always a point at which the moderator will say, and of course people know you from… and you see 75% of the audience go that was you?! My work is very siloed. So loads of people who might read my columns or read the stuff that I’ve written about Northern Ireland, or my own book [ Did Ye Hear Mammy Died] have no idea that I’m the same guy because I never talk about it. Maybe they think Séamas O’Reilly is a more common name than it is.

“They say you should be careful what you get famous for, but I mean, off the back of that thread I pretty much got to quit my job and write full time. It’s useful if you can trace success back to something so objectively stupid, because it frees you from a lot of the petty vanities. It really was so completely bananas that it blew up the way that it did because I see stuff, really funny, silly threads all the time and they don’t have nearly the same reach. It’s just one of those things. I was the main character on Twitter for a couple of days back in 2018 and then occasionally, just off that thread, I become the main character again for a few hours. So that’s been really handy. It kind of gives you a big engine.”

Quitting his job and writing full time resulted in a book deal for his best-selling memoir, Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? Increasingly, as a resident in Brexit-addled Britain, he has also found himself writing about Northern Ireland and the Derry home he grew up in.

“I get to write about Northern Ireland because I’m from Northern Ireland, and the broadsheets don’t know anybody from Northern Ireland. They are kind of sick of writing things so dry because they’re English and they’re terrified. As I always say possibly the only good thing about being from Northern Ireland is that you’re not scared of other Northern Irish people.”

Séamas O'Reilly: Twitter thread that helped make his name is "on its 20th life now". Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

Séamas has been in London for more than a decade and lives there with his wife and two children, a son who just turned four and a new baby daughter.

“I’m here 11 years now, I moved over in 2011, when I was 25. It was when the Irish government were trying to get everyone to leave because their employment figures did not look great. So me and literally all of my friends ended up away, some in London, some in New York, some in Melbourne. There was a time when I had more Irish friends here than were left at home and anyone that was left in Dublin was living with their parents. I remember it was three weeks before we got a place to live and a month before we get a job. We were sitting in McDonald’s because it had free Wi-Fi applying for jobs and doing that awful thing of putting down Irish as an extra language on your CV even though we didn’t really speak it at all.”

In the time that Séamas has been in the UK he has seen how little the British people know about Ireland.

“I think I’d say it breaks up into thirds. About a third of UK people get the arrangement between the two islands, another third thinks that Northern Ireland is Irish, and another third think that the Republic of Ireland is also British.

“I’d say their understanding is worse now, even after Brexit. I grew up on the border, literally, my bedroom looks out into Donegal and my kitchen looks out into Derry. There’s a fence that’s five metres away from my dad’s rose bushes that is, and I’ve measured it, 0.06% of the UK’s border with the Republic of Ireland, and now the European Union. I wrote about this in 2016 and it went very viral. All during the time before the referendum, the border was never mentioned. I think it came up in one Question Time debate, but Boris Johnson never went to Northern Ireland once in the run-up and it was never mentioned in any of the election material. They woke up on that day in June, and spontaneously realised they had a 300-mile border with an economic entity that they had refused to acknowledge existed.

“They also did not know anything about how the Good Friday Agreement operated with relation to the border. They didn’t understand anything about how porous that border not only is but has to be for the psychological wellbeing of people who are Irish-identifying. So, the very fact that this fragile peace, which has many problems, but at the very least has not broken out into full-on troubles again, is maintained largely by things like the fact the border is porous, and someone like my dad can walk the dog and cross the border 12 times in a straight line. There’s not so much as a sign. If something was to go wrong with that you would see very, very dark things.

“Not that’s necessarily going to happen but that’s why we have seatbelts. You know, I’ve never been in a car accident but I’ve worn a seatbelt every single time I’ve been in one because you have to legislate for the things that might happen.”

Séamas O'Reilly: "we have to hold affection for the fact that Ireland lacks the psychopaths of other places". Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

Séamas is very much looking forward to his new column with The Irish Examiner, starting next Saturday in Weekend. The English and Irish are very alike but there are things that he misses and looks forward to writing about.

“I always think we’re very similar, it’s just the Irish people require fewer filters. There’s an openness. I see it when I go back to Derry, but even in Dublin, which maybe the rest of Ireland sees as being cold and standoffish, is exactly the same. It’s like a big village compared to most places. You know, you can sit at a bus stop and someone will start a conversation with you about anything. Now if someone did that to me in London I would call the police because it’s so rare to have that kind of open interaction,” he laughs, but he’s right.

“There’s a freeness that I miss. We’re quite even-handed and empathetic and funny. Sometimes that’s misinterpreted as being, oh, it’s all great craic and having a laugh, and is that, but it’s also listening to people when they speak and not being as tribal in terms of the ideas that are being exchanged. I think Irish people need to hear that from other Irish people, not just from visiting tourists, where it might sound a bit a trite.

“Also so much of the kind of the conduct of public discourse of the press is relatively fair-minded. I think like all Irish people my age, who would consider themselves broadly on the left, I have loads of problems with big newspapers, politicians and whatever else in Ireland but compared to here where there are literal psychopaths in control, we have to hold affection for the fact that Ireland lacks the psychopaths of other places.

“To Micheál Martin’s credit, I think is his comments recently about the trans debate and his comments about Roe v. Wade acknowledged that fair-mindedness again. Micheál Martin is not necessarily someone I would always agree with but there’s a surplus of reasonableness there, which I think sometimes Britain lacks. Britain shrouds so much of its unreasonableness in flowery politeness as if that makes up for it.

“So yeah, tell them it will be a column of flattery, I’ll write about all the things I love about Ireland that we sometimes forget.”