• 2 Paul Howard, RO’CK of Ages: From Boom Days to Zoom Days, Dublin, Sandycove, 2021.
• 3 Kevin Power, “Ross O’Carroll-Kelly”, Irish Independent, 6 November 2008, p. 11.

This interview with Paul Howard, the creator of the Ross O’Carroll-Kelly phenomenon, published in the introduction to The Miseducation Years, is significant for this essay, in that it suggests that a relationship between father and son is the fons et origo of the books. In the Ross O’Carroll-Kelly series, there are twenty-two novels, four plays, two musicals, a mock travel guide of South Dublin, a book of mock interviews with all of the characters in the series, as well as the ongoing newspaper columns, a selection of which form the core of a book published in 2021 entitled RO’CK of Ages.2 Ross first appeared in The Sunday Tribune newspaper from 1998 to 2007, and then migrated to The Irish Times, or, as the character himself would put it, in the upper-class accent which permeates the books, “The Oirish Toimes”. Such spelling deviations form a stylistic feature called eye-dialect, which forces the reader to speak the words aloud, and by reading phonetically, the reader then mimics the accent of the haute bourgeoisie who are the main target of Howard’s satire. This strategy is clever in that even as the reader laughs at them, he / she mimics their way of speaking, and by analogy their way of seeing Ireland, so that performatively, the reader inhabits their accent and by extension endorse, aspects of their worldview. These comic novels are powered by the twin engines of language and class “and the way in which one expresses or betrays the other”,3 as well as by a sophisticated mode of dual narration.

• 4 Clare Gorman, The Undecidable: Jacques Derrida and Paul Howard, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scho (...)
• 5 Eugene O’Brien, Reading Paul Howard: The Art of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, London, Routledge, 2024.
• 6 Mike Cronin, “Sport, Masculinity and Self-Centredness in the Writings of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly”, Spo (...)
• 7 Adam Kelly, “The Re-education of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly”, Éire-Ireland, vol. 52, no. 1 & 2, 2007, p.  (...)
• 8 Aran Ward Sell, “Even Better than the Real Thing: A Conceptual History of the ‘Celtic Phoenix’”, Ir (...)
• 9 Carolina P. Amador-Moreno, “A Corpus-Based Approach to Contemporary Irish Writing: Ross O’Carroll-K (...)
• 10 Carolina P. Amador-Moreno, “‘There’s, like, total silence again, roysh, and no one says anything’: (...)
• 11 Ana María Terrazas-Calero, Carolina P. Amador-Moreno, “Encapsulating Irish English in Literature”, (...)
• 12 Eugene O’Brien, “A ‘Third’ Reading: James Joyce and Paul Howard and the Monstrous Aporia”, in Passa (...)
• 13 Eugene O’Brien, “‘Tendency-Wit’: The Cultural Unconscious of the Celtic Tiger in the Writings of Pa (...)

1As novels, they chronicle the progress and regress of contemporary Ireland in a way unlike those of any other writer, but the academic scholarship of this series is surprisingly slight. Currently, the only texts on Ross O’Carroll-Kelly that could be classified as academic scholarship are a book by Clare Gorman, The Undecidable: Jacques Derrida and Paul Howard4 and a monograph by myself: Reading Paul Howard: The Art of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly.5 There are a number of articles such as Mike Cronin’s “Sport, Masculinity and Self-Centredness in the Writings of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly”;6 Adam Kelly’s “The Re-education of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly”;7 an article by Aran Ward Sell;8 three linguistic analyses of the Ross novels by Carolina P. Amador-Moreno: “A Corpus-Based Approach to Contemporary Irish Writing: Ross O’Carroll-Kelly’s Use of Like as a Discourse Marker”;9 “‘There’s, like, total silence again, roysh, and no one says anything’: Fictional Representations of ‘New’ Pragmatic Markers and Quotatives in Irish English”;10 and “Encapsulating Irish English in Literature”, by Carolina P. Amador-Moreno and Ana María Terrazas-Calero.11 I have written two previous pieces on Howard myself: “A ‘Third’ Reading: James Joyce and Paul Howard and the Monstrous Aporia”;12 and “‘Tendency-Wit’: The Cultural Unconscious of the Celtic Tiger in the Writings of Paul Howard”.13 His work is mentioned in passing in ten other academic articles but that is all.

• 14 Dublin 4 is the postcode of a wealthy and influential area of the city, wherein most of the charact (...)

2Childhood and adolescence play an important part in the series, as Ross’s greatest youthful rugby triumphs establish his claims to athletic greatness. He is a member of the fee-paying Castlerock school team that wins the Leinster Senior Schools Cup, and as the son of a very wealthy South Dublin couple, he is very privileged. This essay will show how Howard satirises aspects of Dublin 4 privilege,14 while at the same time contriving to make Ross an almost likeable comic character. As a late teenager, all of his bills are paid, he has his own car and a level of parental support that seems to be completely unjustified. In this series, Howard is satirising the parenting style of the haute bourgeoisie, and their propensity to support their children to excess and shield them from the vicissitudes of life at each and every turn.

• 15 Paul Howard, The Miseducation Years, p. 224.
• 16 Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 12, (...)

3Charles, Ross’s father, shows him unconditional love, and never blames him for anything. So when Ross, who feels he has a very good chance of having sex with a young teacher, texts his friend, Christian, the following message in text-speak: “Yo! Ive a techer here who wants my dck bad. Ring d radison in stilrgan n book me a suite. Quick. She wants me NOW!”, he realises too late that he has, in fact, sent it to his father, whom he derisively terms “Dick Features”. Alphabetically, this nickname comes just after that of Christian in Ross’s telephone contacts list, which explains the error, but the response is surprising: “I open his reply and it’s like, No probs, Kicker, the tool that he is”.15 This is an aberrant response from a father to his seventeen-year-old son, but as those familiar with the series will know, it is synecdochic of how Charles treats Ross, and Charles, in turn, is synecdochic of how large numbers of a class of South Dublin parents treat their children. Ross’s ungrateful reaction is also synecdochic of a sense of privilege and entitlement that had serious consequences for Irish society during and after the Celtic Tiger. In a manner redolent of the Freudian repetition compulsion, Ross will repeat this mode of behaviour with his own daughter, Honor, “without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it”.16

• 18 Arthur Beesley, Marie O’Halloran, Ronan McGreevy, “Private School Says Beacon Hospital Said Vaccina (...)

And of course, the reader smiles, until the following week’s “real” headlines in Ireland reveal that twenty teachers and staff in St Gerard’s, a fee-paying school just outside Bray, County Wicklow, received “leftover” vaccines in the Beacon private hospital, and coincidentally, that “the children of Beacon chief executive Michael Cullen attend the school”. The hospital maintained that they had permission of the Health Service Executive (HSE), but the HSE did not agree: “These vaccines were administered contrary to our very clear guidelines and we certainly did not approve them”.18 This was followed by a number of occasions where “the great and the good” (read the wealthy and the entitled) have been seen to get vaccines ahead of their allotted place. It is Howard’s awareness of how the Irish haute bourgeoisie never sees itself as being unfair, but rather as entitled, a position voiced enthusiastically and unironically by Ross and his father Charles in his books. Ross is the classic limited narrator, who sees nothing wrong with his inherited privilege. However, Howard does see through this placenta of self-entitlement, and consistently punctures it with clear, satirical incisions.

• 20 Paul Howard, RO’CK of Ages…, p. 76.
• 21 Ibid., p. 256.
• 22 This term phonetically parodies the ITV series Loose Women, but is also a multi-lingual pun, as it (...)
• 23 Paul Howard, RO’CK of Ages…, p. 114.
• 24 Paul Howard, The Miseducation Years, p. 8.

6The same is true of his parents, who might be termed unrepentant Dublin 4 dwellers, who have very little time for any other part of the city, let alone the country, and have no issues in voicing this. Ross’s mother, Fionnuala, is an author of a “recession-era misery lit novel, Mom, They Said They’d Never Heard of Sundried Tomatoes”.20 As she tells Ross, “[…] there are People Like Us and there are People Like Them. As your father says, this city has been planned in such a way as to ensure that we lead parallel and mutually exclusive lives”.21 She has formed a group called “Luas Women”,22 which is protesting against linking the red and green lines of the Luas (an Irish tram system), and campaigns against any extension of the postcode “Dublin 4” to people in Terenure, again quoting her husband: “If the people of Terenure want to live in Dublin 4, why don’t they simply buy houses in Dublin 4? A damn liberty expecting Dublin 4 to come to them”.23 The reader sees the privilege, the classism, the smug sense of self-regard, but Fionnuala does not, and again, it is in that gap between characters mired in their own ideology, and an author who allows them to express this until it becomes a reductio ad absurdum, that the humour lies. Howard points to the “chip on [his] shoulder about class, which was a very big issue in the Ireland in which [he] grew up”, and admits that he began his satirical project with “certain axes to grind when [he] set out to satirise the world of school rugby”,24 and that he gradually moved away from the players on the field to their parents, friends and family groups.

• 25 Paul Howard, RO’CK of Ages…, p. 18.
• 26 Ibid., p. 63.
• 27 Ibid., p. 324-325.
• 28 Ibid., p. 244.
• 29 Paul Howard, Operation Trumpsformation, Dublin, Penguin Ireland, 2017.

7Charles, referred to as a disgraced property developer, local politician and founder of the political party, New Republic, is a right-wing crony capitalist, and an inveterate snob who has no difficulty in propounding sexist, classist and ultra-right-wing opinions. Famous for wanting to be “tough on soccer, tough on the causes of soccer”,25 he responds to the recession by forming a document-disposal firm called Shred Focking Everything, destroying documents which could be evidence of wrongdoing: “People aren’t ready to hear what it was that made this country great for eleven-and-a-little-bit years. All we’re doing is making sure that no one finds out”.26 He teaches Ross’s daughter to play an Irish property version of Monopoly, “capitalism in all its wonderful glory”, as he calls it, and when Honor wants to buy a house on Capel Street “[s]he takes a hundred from her little pile of money and she puts it into – hilariously – a little brown envelope”, and Charles then “slips it into his pocket – or ‘off shore’, as he calls it”.27 He is unrepentant about his role in the Celtic Tiger, and the €48 million that he hid in Andorra. He and his solicitor-friend, Hennessy Coughlin-O’Hara, “are tendering to build a portion of this famous wall that Donald Trump wants to build”,28 and while a comical character, Charles’s role darkens in the later books, proleptic of the rise of the right in world politics, as signalled by this mention of Trump, as well as in the title of one of his books Operation Trumpsformation.29 Charles says that the boom was created by people like him bending laws and bribing people:

• 31 Paul Howard, The Oh My God Delusion, Dublin, Penguin Ireland, 2010, p. 150.
• 32 Paul Howard, We Need to Talk about Ross, Dublin, Penguin Ireland, 2009.

8In Howard’s books, the fiction is that Howard, the author, is being told the events of each book by Ross the eponymous character, and he then repeats them in the voice of Ross. Each book has the title printed and then, in parenthesis (“as told to Paul Howard”). He is set up like some sort of ghost-writer with a photographic memory, or a dictaphone, who faithfully writes out all that Ross narrates to him. In effect, he is a cross between a mediating speaker and a first-person narrator, as while Howard is not directly present in any of the books (except one), he is a silent speaker who nevertheless mediates what the other characters are saying. His mediation is very subtle, as there is no omniscient narrative perspective. No one tells the reader what the characters are thinking, and Ross himself acts as a second layer of mediation, as the reader can only know what Ross tells us, and Ross is well aware of his limitations: “I’m so slow sometimes, they could put deckchairs on me and call me a focking cruise ship”.31 Hence, Howard has to write in such a way that the reader both hears what Ross tells us, but also that he / she sees and hears more than he tells us; Howard has to make us dislike Ross enough for the satire to bite, but not enough to make us disengage from the character altogether, and his interaction with one of his friends, Sophie, is a case in point. I think the source of so much satirical irony in the books is to be found in the gap between the speaking subject, Ross, and the listening and then narrating subject, Paul Howard. In one book, We Need to Talk about Ross,32 Howard narrates how he wants to tell more about Ross and does so by interviewing, in his own persona, the other characters, thereby breaking down the narratological fourth wall by becoming a narrator who is now in the actual book as a character, providing even more multi-layered modes of satirical presentation.

• 33 Paul Howard, The Teenage Dirtbag Years, originally published by the Sunday Tribune, Dublin, O’Brien (...)
• 34 Paul Howard, The Orange Mocha-Chip Frappuccino Years, Dublin, O’Brien Press, 2003, p. 178.
• 35 Ibid.
• 36 Ibid., p. 180.
• 37 Ibid., p. 181.

9In the earlier books, when dealing with teenage characters, Howard points out the mostly female obsession with remaining slim: “[…] and Emer’s there, ‘Oh my God, that reminds me, how many points is a muffin?’ and Sophie’s like, ‘five-and-a-half’”.33 The societal imperative that women should look slim is hegemonic across media and fashion discourses, and Sophie is seen to have serious issues with her body: “[…] the girl is, like, TOTALLY obsessed”, and has spoken of getting “rhytidectomies and laser skin-resurfacing”.34 Her friends think she is getting some form of cosmetic surgery, and are jealous: “She’s going to think she’s SO beautiful”.35 Just out of curiosity, and without any real desire to comfort her, Ross and his friend Oisinn decide to go and see what she got done in the hospital. She is post-operative, and has her face bandaged, and Oisinn bursts out laughing, “[…] and I go, ‘Focking hell, Sophie. You look like the Elephant Man’”.36 Her response to this cruelty is to drop the bunch of grapes in her hand, and then the two boys hear the “sound of, like, water splashing onto the floor. And we look down, and Sophie’s, like, pissed herself”.37

• 38 Ibid.
• 39 Ibid., p. 199.

10This is the Juvenalian satirical mode, as this spoiled and privileged boy has absolutely no empathy at all for Sophie, and seems to be immune to the damage he is doing to an obviously frail and fragile young woman who is at a very vulnerable place in her life. Howard has said that the Ross series began in anger, but that as time went on, he came to actually like the character, and this developing fondness is clear in how the Juvenalian satire is mitigated through a more kindly Horatian mode. The episode ends with the following admission from Ross: “And on the way home not a single word passes between us, between Oisinn and his asshole friend”.38 There is a dawning of self-knowledge here, just a hint, that stops the reader from completely hating him. The same is true later in the book, where Sophie, deep in counselling, writes him a letter, making it very clear how deeply he has hurt her. She explains that she has “Distorted Body Image Syndrome”, which basically means that she hates the way she looks all the time: “I thought my chin was too fat and my eyes as well”, and she looked for the surgery as a birthday present. Her comments on Ross’s visit are telling and unsparing: “Imagine it, Ross. All your deepest little secrets and insecurities are laid out in the open for people to laugh at and then gossip about with their friends. I had to be sedated that night, you know”.39

• 40 Ibid., p. 200.
• 41 Ibid.
• 42 Ibid., p. 204.

11This is heartbreaking, and the writing is crystal clear; the confessional tone and the obvious signs of someone at the end of their tether should make us despise Ross for what he has done, and Sophie spells out her feelings towards him later in the letter: “I’m incapable of feeling anything but hate for you”, and she goes on to note that she thinks he is a “very unhappy person”.40 She adds that she has learned not to worry about other people, but “to be happy with who I am”.41 Ross’s reaction to this letter is not to share it or to laugh, but to fold it up and put it back in his pocket. The effect of the letter, and of his dawning realisation of how awfully he has behaved, is what spurs him to offer a house (he is working as an estate agent) to a more deserving couple later in the book, and to use some bribe money to tide them over Christmas. Barry Conroy, his employer at Hook, Lyon and Sinker, lets him go with regret, noting that he has now developed a conscience, which he sees as “a bad, bad thing to have. In this game anyway”.42 Ross is clearly influenced by Charles and his very critical judgements on other people, but the way the stories are told means that he retains our sympathy, which is necessary if the comedic universe is to remain intact, as indeed does Charles. I think that the nexus between satire, irony and narrative perspective is central to the whole epistemological structure of the series as a whole.

• 43 Matthew Bevis, Comedy: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013, p. 85.
• 44 Paul Howard, We Need to Talk about Ross, p. 9.
• 45 Paul Howard, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightdress, Dublin, Penguin Ireland, 2005, p. 1 (...)
• 46 Paul Howard, Normal Sheeple, Dublin, Penguin, 2021, p. 123.
• 47 Paul Howard, Braywatch, Dublin, Penguin Ireland, 2020, p. 1.
• 48 Paul Howard, Mr S and the Secrets of Andorra’s Box, Dublin, Penguin Ireland, 2008, p. 253.

12That there is some good in Ross is clear from these early stages, and Howard’s satire, while it can be piercing, is moving towards a more redemptive arc, using humour as “a road to redemption”.43 Howard’s work is satirically syncretic in that it fuses Horatian and Menippean, and occasionally Juvenalian, modes of satire across the range of the series. Stylistically, he tends to give each character a leitmotif, whether it is a linguistic tic as in Charles’s ongoing self-punctuation “Quote-unquote!”;44 “Exclamation mork!”45 (which changes to a repeated “Exclamation mork! Exclamation mork! Exclamation mork!” later in the series);46 or Latin tags: “macte virtute sic itur ad astra! Excellence is the way to the stors”;47 or “id est, if you’ll pardon the Latin”.48 These make him a comical character and it can be hard for a reader to see through these to the proto-fascist and right-wing opinions which he unashamedly voices.

• 49 Patrick Freyne, “Interview with Paul Howard”, The Irish Times, 8 September 2014.

13Given the conceit that Ross is telling Paul Howard all of the stories, there is a confessional dialectic already at work throughout the books. In this sense, Ross, even though he is telling us the horrible things he has done, is establishing a rapport with the reader as he is taking us into his confidence. This narrative style is perhaps part of the reason why Ross is not as hateful as he should be, and interestingly, Howard tells us that he set out to make him hateful. The columns, which lampooned the privately educated scions of South Dublin, were originally a lot “harder edged”, says Howard, as he had been carrying “a lot of chips on [his] shoulder about class”, as Dublin in the 1980s had a clear dividing line between working, middle and upper classes. As he says, “I think it was clear [in the early books] that I hated Ross”, but that changed with the longevity of the series as “to write about a character for so long you have to have sympathy for him”.49

• 50 Paul Howard, The Miseducation Years, p. 7.
• 51 Paul Howard, The Teenage Dirtbag Years, p. 7.
• 52 Paul Howard, The Orange Mocha-Chip Frappuccino Years, p. 7.
• 53 Paul Howard, The Miseducation Years, p. 10.

14The first three books take Ross through school, a year in university, a trip to the United States on a J1 visa and then his time working as an estate agent in the burgeoning Celtic Tiger period, when property was becoming both expensive and desirable. It is a process that so many young Irish people now follow – school to third level to a middle-class job – though Ross only takes the job having been thrown out by his parents after offering them yet more abuse. The whole setting is that of teenage concerns, and hence the chapter titles, always worth noting in Howard’s carefully-constructed comedic world, guide us into the cultural context. The chapter titles in The Miseducation Years all refer to comments from a school report: “Comes to Class Unprepared”, “Has Minimal Attention Span”;50 those of The Teenage Dirtbag Years refer to exam questions which are all about Ross, hence signifying his rampant narcissism: “‘Ross Is, Like, such an Orsehole to Women.’ Discuss”, “‘Ross, Like, So Loves Himself It’s Not Funny.’ Discuss”;51 while those of The Orange Mocha-Chip Frappuccino Years all refer to episode titles from the TV show Friends, but with Ross mentioned in each one: “The One Where Ross Does a Shitty Thing”, “The One Where Ross Grows a Heart”.52 So before one of the books is read, the sense of a character with rampant narcissism, who sees himself as always being watched by others, becomes clear. The fact that the majority of the comments about him in all chapter titles are negative is something of which he remains largely blissfully unaware throughout the series, as evidenced by his own view of himself as “Dead Eye Dick with a rugby ball” who is “good-looking, amazing body, big-time chormer, great with the ladies and absolutely loaded”.53

• 54 Ibid., p. 42.
• 55 Ibid., p. 44.

15In the early books, rugby is the master signifier of all that Ross is and wants to be, and this is very much at the behest of Charles. It is as a schoolboy rugby player that his fame will come, and this is something that has been moulded in him in Castlerock (an invented name which has strong resonances of private South Dublin schools such as Blackrock College or Castleknock College). Ross is the Out-Half, also called Fly-Half, on the College Senior team, the “S” as it is termed, and he is the player who directs all attacks, and takes all of the penalties and converts the tries. It is a position of seminal importance on any rugby team, and Ross fills it with aplomb. His teachers prioritise the Leinster Senior Schools Cup, the competition in which Castlerock will be competing, and his coach “Sooty” – Mr Sutton “who is the coach of the S”54 – stresses the importance of the game, telling the team that their final exam, the Leaving Certificate, “doesn’t matter a damn. You can sit it again next year”.55

• 56 Ibid., p. 57.
• 57 Ibid.

16Mr Sutton is a teacher in the school and it is interesting to see him decry educational, as opposed to sporting, achievement. This deconstruction of the normative values of the education system is at the core of Howard’s satire, and this is set up from the outset. His history teacher, Mr Crabtree, however, is unwilling to encourage Ross’s casual attitude to learning. Ross arrives late for a history lesson and the following exchange takes place: “[…] he goes, ‘You’re late,’ and of course I’m there, ‘No shit, Sherlock,’ giving him the same amount of attitude back”.56 When asked about the causes of the First World War, which he was supposed to have learned off by heart, Ross replies: “I don’t think you understand. I’m on the S”.57 It is interesting that in the book the abbreviation “S” for Senior cup team is not in inverted commas; but just accepted as a word in the language of the school, an example of how language is skewed in this fictional universe to reflect the classist and patriarchal culture with which the boys are imbued. As a further satirical twist on the norm, the teacher is later forced by Ross’s principal, Father Fehily, to apologise to him:

• 59 Adam Kelly, “The Re-education of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly”, p. 67.

Howard notes that when he was a sports reporter, the status of these players among teachers, partners, fellow pupils and female fans was something very new to him, as was the swagger and the arrogance these players demonstrated, and it is with this very arrogance that the series began, and here the satire is quite Juvenalian, as these schools charge high fees for attendance, and yet seem to prioritise sport over education, something which is accepted by both parents and students alike. The attitude is critiqued in a very Menippean manner as it is not just one or two teachers but the whole school ethos which is profoundly patriarchal and classist. In the world of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly all forms of high culture and learning have become unnecessary window-dressing for the “maintenance of hierarchy and the pursuit of gain”.59

• 60 Paul Howard, The Miseducation Years, p. 28.
• 61 Ibid.
• 62 Paul Howard, The Teenage Dirtbag Years, p. 25.
• 63 Ibid., p. 26.
• 64 Paul Howard, Ross O’Carroll-Kelly’s Guide to South Dublin: How to Get By On, Like, €10,000 a Day, D (...)

17Ross’s own father, Charles, is very much of the view that men are better than women, and that middle-class and upper-class men are better than anyone else. His desire for Ross to be a rugby star is clear from the opening of the series, as is his unrepentant capitalism and classism. So he loudly opposes “a halting site in Foxrock”, by saying that it is “just not appropriate. I’m thinking about them as much as anyone else. They wouldn’t be happy here”.60 He is also a developer of housing estates who has been part of an endemic culture of bribery and corruption: “There were times, of course, when all you had to do was pop a few hundred pounds in an envelope and hey presto you had the council on your side”.61 All of his prejudices combine around his ongoing involvement in rugby, and his genuine horror when there is a rumour that the Irish rugby stadium is to be moved: “They’re moving them to … God, I can’t even say it … the northside”.62 And he blames former Irish Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, who hailed from working class Drumcondra, for this: “Oh you should have heard that blasted Bertie Ahern on the one o’clock news, so bloody smug. A national stadium. Quote-unquote. And all to boost his popularity out in, what’s this you and your pals call it … Knackeragua?”.63 The final word is an especially unpleasant one, as it is a generic term for the northside of Dublin: “Knackeragua: noun a generic term to describe any disadvantaged part of Dublin”.64

• 65 Paul Howard, The Miseducation Years, p. 83.

18When Ross plays a game of rugby, Charles is a vociferous presence on the side-line (his vocal loudness is graphologically rendered by putting his comments in upper case): “HERE HE COMES! HERO OF THE HOUR! ANOTHER MILESTONE IN THE HISTORY OF IRISH RUGBY. AND NO SIGN OF GERRY THORNLEY. THE PAPER OF RECORD HAVE SENT A FREELANCE!”.65 The fact that Charles never attempts to chastise or rebuke Ross for his obnoxious behaviour is a strong motivator of that behaviour, and while Charles is a figure of fun and very much the classic doting parent, nevertheless he represents a lot of opinions that are deeply held, but not so loudly expressed, in contemporary upper-class and upper-middle-class Irish society. Charles is the voice of the entitled, of the privileged, and he and his ilk still retain significant control and power in Ireland. Howard voices Charles in an exaggerated hyperbolic manner which makes the reader laugh, but the underlying patriarchal classism and sense of entitlement undercut the laughter, and show us something that is very strong in Irish culture.

• 66 Paul Howard, The Orange Mocha-Chip Frappuccino Years, p. 90.

19For example, when a homeless asks him for money for a cup of tea, Charles, without irony, tells him that he drinks too much tea: “Bad for you, all that caffeine. Makes you sluggish. Probably why you’ve no home and no job”.66 And his opinion of the poor is equally politically incorrect:

• 70 Tim O’Brien, “Bank Chief Calls for ‘Brave’ Budget”, The Irish Times, 6 October 2008.
• 71 Seán Fitzpatrick, Anglo Irish Bank’s chairman, interviewed by Marion Finucane, on The Marian Finuca (...)

This is so hyperbolic that it makes us smile and yet, just as Anglo Irish Bank was about to implode, taking much of the Irish economy with it, its CEO, Seán Fitzpatrick, widely seen as one of the architects of the financial meltdown, when asked about how Ireland could cope better with recession, “called on the Government to reduce corporation tax and tackle the ‘sacred cow’ of universal child benefit, State pensions and medical cards for the over-70s”.70 One can hear echoes here of Charles’s views on unmarried mothers from this man who, on 4 October 2008, was still maintaining that “Anglo Irish Bank [was] a very well-capitalised bank”.71

• 72 Paul Howard, The Teenage Dirtbag Years, p. 236.

20In this context, it becomes clear that Charles’s opinions, while they are expressed in a way that makes us smile, are in fact obnoxious, and part of Howard’s real skill is to make us like Charles as a character even as he voices these opinions, a hallmark of the Horatian mode of satire. As a father, he offers Ross unconditional love and support, and is always there to make sure that he is financially solvent. During Ross’s J1 visit to the United States, it is Charles who makes sure that he has sufficient money to enjoy his sojourn there: “The old man is a dickhead and everything, roysh, but the money comes bang on time”.72 Ross has been taught that relationships, even family ones, can be commodified and that human contact can be replaced by money: it is a lesson that will leave deep marks on him.

• 73 In 2004, the Moriarty Tribunal was set up to examine matters related to former Taoiseach Charles Ha (...)

21In many ways, Charles is at the core of the moral climate of this book as he is a capitalist who has risen to wealth by circumventing laws about planning, taxation and decent treatment of workers. He is the voice of a proto-Donald Trump, praising himself and his cronies for their independence of spirit, and using every aspect of the law to help him gain advantage until that no longer works, when he then feels quite free to break that law with impunity. To cite one of his more memorable quotations about tribunals investigating corruption, where he is speaking about Hennessey, who is “an innocent man” forced to flee to “Rio de Janeiro to escape the Star Chamber down at Dublin Castle”:73

• 75 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Richard Nice (trans.), L (...)
• 76 David Swartz, Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, Chicago, University of Chicago P (...)

22Money is important, but as will be seen throughout the series, it is not important in itself, and, in a bizarre way, it is not important for what it can buy. Rather, it is important because it acts as the one defining marker of class left in a secular and largely post-Catholic Ireland. It is interesting that the two sacred cows of Irish identity, and indeed of much Irish scholarship in the 20^th century, are eloquent silences in the world of Ross: I refer of course to religion and nationalism. In this Ireland, it is what one wears, where one lives and the material nature of one’s life, that act as markers and signifiers of identity. Money is more about exchange-value or, to be more accurate, about symbolic exchange-value. It is a form of symbolic capital, in that it allows people to purchase desirable objects and to show their good taste: “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier”.75 It is a type of “denied capital”, as it is a form of power that is not perceived as power but as “legitimate demands for recognition”.76

• 77 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, Ben Fowkes (trans.), London, Penguin B (...)

23This term “exchange-value” derives from the writing of Karl Marx, and from the first volume of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, where he makes the point about how wood changes qualitatively once it has been made into a table. It is still wood, “an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness”.77 The point for Marx is that the use-value of the table, a four-legged raised platform at which people can sit, work and eat, has been surpassed by what he calls its exchange-value. A table is not just a table, it can become a classic piece of furniture; it can become an antique; it can be exchanged for far more money than it took to purchase and manufacture because it has now attained some extra form of value. This value is largely imaginary – a diamond, qua rock, is no better or worse than a piece of quartz, but issues of rarity and cultural and symbolic capital have made it valuable to the point of almost being a fetish.

• 78 Paul Howard, The Teenage Dirtbag Years, p. 232.
• 79 Ibid., p. 235.
• 80 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, p. 291.

24To revert to Charles’s world, having a piece of quartz on his finger as jewellery is not valued by society; having a diamond is and it serves to differentiate him from those for whom lycra tracksuits and football jerseys are worn as fashion garments. Dealing with workers as being less than human is also a part of his identity, as he rants to Ross about his workers and their anger at having a coffee machine removed. The workers go on strike, and Fionnuala tells him to just put the machine back, but he refuses: “[…] that’d be a climbdown I told her. They see one sign of weakness in me and we’ll have that minimum wage nonsense all over again”,78 and as he goes on to say: “The gloves are off. I’m not giving in to the unions. Oh, no. Give them back their blasted machine and it’ll be breast-feeding stations and gluten-free bread for the world and his mother next”.79 Again the hyperbole is amusing, but the core message is clear – these people represent very little to Charles: they are indices of value to him, not as use-value employees, but as signifiers who have little agency themselves; they are reflections of his own power in the workplace: and one thinks of the way that Trump refers to people he sees of being as little value. He is able to provide or take away, and this gives him a sense of power, “the worker works for the capitalist instead of for himself”,80 and it is this ownership that is at the core of Charles’s desire to remove the coffee machine; he wants to own their time and their agency as much as the work they do within his company. This attitude to people is clearly replicated by Ross, who also only values those of high worth, or who make him feel better about his own worth.

• 81 Paul Howard, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightdress, p. 43 (italics in the original).
• 82 Ibid., p. 98.
• 83 Paul Howard, Should Have Got Off at Sydney Parade, Dublin, Penguin Ireland, 2006, p. 143.
• 84 Ibid., p. 146.

25The second father figure who is a huge influence on Ross is his school principal, Father Denis Fehily, who is a pervasive presence in the series. In the early books, he is seen as the rugby-loving elitist whose primary desire is to win the Leinster Senior Schools Cup. It is often said that Howard rarely critiques the Church, but having a Nazi sympathiser in charge of an élite all-boys school, whose whole attitude to Rugby and the other schools they play is both militaristic and classist, would certainly seem to hit the satirical button. That Fehily is a Nazi supporter is made clear in the book. He is happy to quote Hitler in terms of educational ideology – “A violently active, intrepid, brutal youth – that is what I am after… I will have no intellectual training. Knowledge is ruin for my young men”81 – and sees the introduction of schools like Newbridge College in the Leinster Senior Schools Cup as “social ecumenism”, again citing Hitler who “considered the theory that all men are created equal to be the most deceitful lie”.82 In Should Have Got Off at Sydney Parade, he has been arrested in Paris for war crimes as a member of the Milice française.83 Fehily speaks of his time in Vienna and in Paris during the rise of Hitler, and there is a fondness and nostalgia expressed by him about these times: “The colour. The atmosphere. The uniforms. Lines of storm troopers marching in perfect goose-step. You couldn’t help but be swept along by it all”:84

• 86 Ibid., p. 147.
• 87 Ibid., p. 148.
• 88 Ibid.

He goes on to explain that it was in Vienna that he fell in love with a girl called Vianne, who looked like Constance Bennett and was French, from Clermont-Ferrand.86 Her father was quite senior in the Vichy regime, and was “close to Philippe Pétain, Joseph Damand, all those boys. He took me under his wing and I joined the Milice française”.87 However Fehily was unable to support the torture of people by the Milice, “They loved their work, those boys. I mean, they were worse than the Gestapo, worse than the SS” – and having watched them torture an old man, a baker from Saint Paul, he told Vianne he could not stay: “We were different people. I had my beliefs. She had hers. We said goodbye”.88

• 89 Paul De Man, Aesthetic Ideology, Andrzej Warminski (ed.), Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Pres (...)

26Once again, Howard takes a caricature and gradually shapes a character, as a man in love with Nazi ideology and aesthetics has a moment of redemption in reaction to the torture of a fellow human being, and can no longer support the regime. What makes the critique interesting, though, is that Fehily is willing to acknowledge the thrill and the power of the Nazi sweep through Europe. The Nazis’ fusion of aesthetics and politics, what Paul De Man (someone also attracted to this fusion in his early years in Belgium) has termed “aesthetic ideology”, was very popular at the time, winning many admirers who later recoiled from the horror of how this ideology acted in real human terms.89 Fehily embodies this contradiction, and he is further complicated by the fact that his redemptive recoil has not dampened his attraction to many of the aspects of Nazi ideology that first attracted him. How such a character can retain any fondness on the part of the reader is interesting, but as ever, Howard gradually builds up layer upon layer of complexity until notions of black and white judgement become blurred.

• 90 Paul Howard, Should Have Got Off at Sydney Parade, p. 260.

27So after hearing all of this, as the reader recoils from the thought that this man should be in any way in charge of the education of the young, it is revealed that he has written a letter to Charles (whom he also taught) about his grandson Ronan, who Charles has been unwilling to acknowledge. He speaks of Ronan’s “charisma”, and how he is “funny and a joy to be around”, but also of a sadness in his heart, and he makes the telling point that Charles’s non-relationship with Ronan is hurting Ronan and in time will hurt Charles; “and I know it will upset you to hear that because you’re a good man”.90 As ever with Howard, the fluency and humanity of his writing will gradually humanise Fehily throughout the series and make him, like so many others, take that step from caricature to character. Even as he is dying, he seeks to do some good for the people he loves, and this is something that remains with the reader. So, from the outset, his pep-talks to the Senior team are a mixture of Nazi reminiscence, utter classism and touches of the Bible which he seems to have altered to fit his theme: this chaotic juxtaposition of discourses is carnivalesque, to use a Bakhtinian term, and hence impossible to take seriously, thereby diminishing the impact of the ideology contained therein.

• 91 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Caryl Emerson (ed. and trans.), Minneapolis, Uni (...)
• 92 Paul Howard, The Miseducation Years, p. 46 (italics in the original).
• 93 Ibid.

28For Mikhail Bakhtin, enormous creative, and therefore genre-shaping, power was possessed by “ambivalent carnivalistic laughter”. This laughter could grasp and comprehend a “phenomenon in the process of change and transition, it could fix in a phenomenon both poles of its evolution in their uninterrupted and creative renewing changeability”; such laughter does not permit a single one of these aspects of change to be absolutised or to congeal in one-sided seriousness.91 Thus Fehily notes that the Sermon on the Mount would probably have said more about the Leinster Senior Schools Cup, had “Our Lord had a little more time”, maybe “leaving out the bit about the meek inheriting the Earth if he was under some class of time constraint. For verily, I say unto thee that schools rugby is truly blesséd. Tend it, guard it and nourish it, for it is written”.92 He is able to ironically hope that these boys will take with them the “moral principles and Christian lessons”, when they go out into the world “to work for investment banks that destroy the Third World, or management consultancies that close down factories and throw poor people onto the dole”.93 While again, the hyperbole is humorous, the humour becomes more Juvenalian when it is realised that the barons of the Celtic Tiger would have been largely people who were educated in Catholic or some Protestant private school and went on to bankrupt countries and cause untold damage to Ireland’s future.

• 94 Ibid.
• 95 Ibid.
• 96 Pierre Bourdieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, Peter Collier (trans.), Stanford, Stan (...)

29Fehily’s over the top comments look less over the top when placed in that context. The sense of entitlement that was seen through all of the reports on the banking crisis can again be traced back to ideological perspectives that were first learned in schools such as this. And for Fehily, as for Charles and Ross, rugby is a weaponised form of class warfare, where schools can inculcate this sense of their pupils as some form of Übermensch as they defeat other schools. And he makes this very clear in an early pep talk against Gonzaga College, telling his students: “[…] you are the very best of your species. The élite. You are better than everyone else in the whole world”.94 And while hyperbolic and satirical, anyone listening to the phone conversations from Anglo Irish Bank (the tape recordings of phone calls from the management of the bank during the crises were made available in the media during one of the investigations), and the sense of entitlement that oozes through all of the reports, can see the results of this kind of ideological indoctrination where privilege is foregrounded. And, for Fehily: “[…] the success of the school’s rugby team […] is an expression of your superiority over people from other schools”.95 If the boys are being told they are far superior to other private schools, then the distance they are taught to feel from children in public schools can only be imagined. With a father figure such as this, someone he genuinely admires, it is no accident that Ross has an inbuilt sense of superiority and arrogance. And it is no accident that he will linguistically and ideologically emulate his patriarchal exemplars Fehily and Charles. Howard is offering a metanoia here in terms of making connections, through humour, between the type of education offered to upper-class and upper-middle-class boys and girls, largely by religious orders, and the type of society in which we live, where homelessness is rife. Pierre Bourdieu coined this sense of metanoia here, which signifies “a change of social space which supposes a change of mental space”’.96 He sees this as a way of thinking through the doxic givens of our culture and habitus and, instead, of seeing things in a new and different way. Satire embodies this metanoetic moment, and Howard’s work features this throughout as his oblique reflection of Ireland allows us to see more of the real Ireland, and its pervasive ideology, which is often obscured.

• 97 Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, London, New Left Books, 1971, p. 175.
• 98 Ibid., p. 174.
• 99 Ibid.

30For Louis Althusser, society achieves its aims of perpetuating the subjective identities, which it desires through ideology. In Althusserian terms, society interpellates the next generation in its own image through socio-cultural and linguistic signifiers, and success comes when individuals voluntarily set out to become what society wishes them to be. The process of interpellation begins with “hailing”, a calling to participate in a form of ideology: “The existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing”.97 Ideology recruits individuals to become what their society, or societal class, wants them to be to perpetuate patterns of power. Ideology is such that when it hails a person “hey, you there!”,98 it has already created the qualities that comprise that person. In Fehily’s speeches, he knows that the boys in front of him already subscribe to his ideology, as he has been teaching it to them in school for six years. A successful hailing occurs if the individual “recognizes that the hail was really addressed to him, and that it was really him who was hailed”.99 This recognition, for example, may be the acceptance of a particular social practice or label, such as an advocate of Christian religious ideology terming himself a Christian, or someone seeing themselves as upper middle class. If a hailing is successful, an individual becomes a “subject” of a particular ideology.

• 100 Paul Howard, The Teenage Dirtbag Years, p. 26.
• 101 Paul Howard, The Orange Mocha-Chip Frappuccino Years, p. 137.
• 102 Ibid., p. 138-139.
• 103 Ibid., p. 189.

31Thus when Ross sees himself as like Charles and Father Fehily, and not like the people living in “Knackeragua”,100 such a successful hailing has taken place; when Ross sees himself as part of an élite, then such a successful hailing has taken place. He has been interpellated into his parents’ view of working-class people as almost less than human, as Charles notes about the lottery winners who move in next to him: “The pigeon loft, the Nissan Bluebird […]. What’s next? Horses wandering around the streets here?”;101 while Fionnuala postulates what the house will look like: “Oh, I can just picture it, Charles. The horror. Net curtains. Brass flower pots in the windows. Clothes drying on radiators […]”.102 Ross will internalise these attitudes, as he speaks of the new neighbour as having “slip-on shoes and a football manager jacket. The windfall’s obviously done fock-all for the goy’s dress sense”. And on being addressed by that neighbour, he responds by saying “‘I’m sorry, I don’t speak working class,’ ripping the piss out of him”.103

• 104 Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, translated by Bruce Fink in collabora (...)
• 105 Paul Howard, The Miseducation Years, p. 159.

32Language is an important aspect of ideology and social class structures; Jacques Lacan notes that the “moment at which desire is humanized is also that at which the child is born into language”,104 and it is through language that it is clear how Ross follows his two father figures. It has already been noted the way he sees working-class people in a manner similar to that of Charles, and it will quickly become clear that he also follows Father Fehily’s views in terms of rugby and its very upper-middle-class ethos and values. Before the final of the Senior Cup, Fehily tells the students that “books, education, learning, these things have their place in the life of young men, of course. But not in yours. Because you are an élite”,105 and he goes on to spell out how interpellated privilege will shape their lives as money, social and symbolic capital will flow to them through their parents and inheritance:

• 107 Ibid.

He goes on to spell out the sense of “brotherhood, and of fraternity” that ideologically bonds the members of such schools together, that sense of an élite whose actions are largely immune from responsibility, as wherever they find themselves “in the world”, and “irrespective of what trouble” they are in, all they need to do “is make a call” and they “shall have succour […] because [they] are Rock and Rock isn’t merely the name of a school. It’s an institution. A way of life. And it is underpinned by rugby”. Ross is very affected by this: “I’m basically bawling here, roysh”,107 as are all the students – all of this is textbook ideological interpellation, and goes some way to explain the attitudes of those involved in the Celtic Tiger crash and its aftermath. It is worth noting the discourse of family and fraternity here as this is another of those shaping functions that are set out by Ross’s two father figures.

• 108 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Michael Holquist (ed. and trans.), Caryl Em (...)

33A pastoral figure who cites Hitler and blithely misquotes the Bible to suit his purposes would seem to be a figure of fun and he is, but here is also someone who can move a bunch of students to tears and thence is someone capable of transmitting an ideology to them in a very direct manner. The almost farcical fusion of biblical, educational, classist and Nazi ideology is a classic of Menippean satire, where “the unfettered and fantastic plots and situations all serve one goal – to put to the test and to expose ideas and ideologues. These are experimental and provocative plots”.108

• 109 Paul Howard, The Miseducation Years, p. 47.
• 110 Ibid., p. 193.
• 111 Ibid., p. 207.

34Both Father Fehily and Charles share a view that victory is worth all efforts and also worth defying and denying all rules and regulations. Castlerock, whose school song has the lines “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Rock. / Castlerock above all others, / Castlerock above all others”,109 must win and won they do, as Ross and his friends on the team asked to repeat Sixth year just for that reason. They are each to be paid “five hundred pounds a week”, with no requirement “to sit […] exams or even to attend classes” (in Ross’s case “some of the teachers have asked that [he] do[es]n’t”).110 And just to be sure, Ross and the team are given steroids: “fifty milligrams stirred into a glass of water five times a day”.111 What is revealed here is that the ideology of the school is such that winning is all, and rules are for breaking. Howard is critiquing the win at all costs outlook that sees young men, especially in the world of rugby, overtraining, eating all sorts of supplements and taking various legal, quasi-legal and blatantly illegal performance-enhancing substances. With these two paternal influences, it is little wonder that Ross sees the end as justifying the means.