The Pluck of the Irish

Artists from the Indiana-size island continue to dominate popular culture. Online, they've gained a rep as the "good Europeans."

- Nate Jones

WHEN WAS THE moment Ireland became cool? Was it in December 2018, when Derry Girls hit Netflix, introducing a global audience to Northern Ireland's '90s pop-culture ephemera? Or was it a few months later, when Sally Rooney's Normal People arrived in the U.S., occasioning multiple glowing New York Times reviews and spurring the first wave of trend pieces about "the cult of Sally Rooney"? Either way, by the time The Banshees of Inisherin was released in 2022, a full-on Irish cultural invasion was underway. Call them the Craic Pack: Authors such as Anna Burns and Paul Lynch won major prizes. Actors Colin Farrell and Cillian Murphy and singer-songwriter Hozier stepped back into the spotlight. Barry Keoghan went from artfilm weirdo to pop-star boyfriend. Even brands got swept up in it: You couldn't call yourself an Instagram baker without extolling the virtues of Kerrygold butter.

As with Taylor Lautner in the second Twilight movie, our affable friend across the pond turned out to be hiding eightpack abs. "Over the past few years, it's become quite twee and also quite sexy to be Irish," says the writer Róisín Lanigan, who published an essay in Vice on the subject. Lanigan first noticed a change around the time Normal People debuted on TV and made a star of Paul Mescal.

"Americans and English people were introduced to a new vision of Ireland: rose-tinted and beautiful," she says.

Lanigan comes from Northern Ireland, and she cautions that this new vision usually depicts "a certain type of Irish.

On the whole, it seems to be, 'They're hot and sad."" Accurate or not, Americans liked what they saw. This past summer's craze for "hot rodent boyfriends" spotlighted several Irish actors. An Instagram account that does nothing but post photos of Mescal has over 160,000 followers. On YouTube, an interview in which comedian Brittany Broski joked that her greatest career goal was "Irish cock" received 2.7 million views.