What do Daniel O’Donnell, pint baby, iodine tablets, Irish reality television, moral panics around sex, Nadine Coyle’s missing passport, housewives of the year, bachelor festivals and the Alive-O religion programme have in common? They all tell the story of Ireland through the pop culture that has shaped us. Páraic Kerrigan, of The Traitors Ireland series, has a new book, Pop Culchie, looking at the quirks of Irish life at that time. Here, he tackles the tricky subject of death…

GROWING UP IRISH, death was just part of the itinerary. Like Mass on Sundays or rain in summer, death and its rituals were part of the background noise of Irish life. As a child, it wasn’t unusual to walk into someone’s sitting room and be greeted, not by tea or biscuits, but by a body laid out in the middle. One summer in Limerick, while staying with my aunt, I was brought to three wakes in a single day. Not that these were grim affairs; on the contrary, they were packed, as if the deceased had sold out three gigs in a row. The mood at these wakes wasn’t mournful either. People chatted, laughed and passed sandwiches around.

Despite the parade of corpses and the ambient smell of incense, I didn’t really get death. Death felt more like a polite absence than a devastating rupture. My grandmother died when I was eight and even then, it was explained to me gently that she had simply gone into another room, and we wouldn’t be seeing her for a long time. This explanation was comforting, if a little vague, as I imagined my grandmother in some never-ending spare bedroom somewhere in Heaven, and wondered if she had a television there.

My true education in the horrors of death didn’t come from a funeral or from the passing of a loved one, however, but from Xtra-vision, Ireland’s video-rental store that was the holy grail of Friday evenings and the closest thing Ireland had to US giant, Blockbuster. When he came home from work on Fridays, my dad would take me to rent a video and one evening, I picked out a VHS copy of My Girl, expecting some light entertainment. This was to be my fatal error, as a number of hours later, death was going to become all too real.

In short, My Girl is a 1991 coming-of-age film set in small-town Pennsylvania in the summer of 1972, where 11-year-old Vada Sultenfuss, played by Anna Chlumsky, lives with her dad, who runs a funeral parlour out of their house. (Why not introduce your child to death literally from home?) Understandably, Vada develops a bit of a death obsession. She befriends Thomas J. Sennet, played by Macaulay Culkin, an unpopular boy who has a number of allergies. As their friendship develops, Vada and Thomas share their first kiss together while in the woods, where Thomas J. accidentally knocks down a beehive nest, resulting in Vada losing her dead mother’s mood ring. Later Thomas J. returns to retrieve her ring but is killed by the bees due to his allergies.

Thomas J.’s death floored me. I had expected a feel-good watch but instead found myself blindsided. When Vada is told that Thomas J. has died, something in me cracked. Watching his body being wheeled into the funeral parlour in a zipped-up bag made me realise that I actually had some feelings. The subsequent funeral scene is one of the most haunting memories of my childhood. Vada, struggling to comprehend the finality of it all, approaches his open casket and pleads with him to go tree climbing. Then she notices he’s not wearing his glasses. In her grief, she sobs, ‘Put his glasses on. He can’t see without his glasses.’ That moment broke me completely.

What was it about this........

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