One of the funniest and most charming storylines to emerge from this year’s awards season is none other than an Irish meme.

At January’s Critics’ Choice Award, comedian and actress Ayo Edebiri took home Best Actress in a Comedy for her role in FX’s hit series The Bear. When she went onstage to deliver yet another charismatic acceptance speech, she had a surprising someone — or nation, rather — to thank.

“I want to thank my real family,” Edebiri told the crowd at Santa Monica Airport’s Barker Hangar, shouting out her loved ones across the world. “To everybody in Boston, Barbados, Nigeria — Ireland, in many ways — thank you so much.”

Members of the audience, including myself, let out audible chuckles. Edebiri is, indeed, from Boston and the daughter of Nigerian and Barbadian parents, respectively. But her alleged “ties” to Ireland are only obvious to those who have witnessed the increasing popularity — and memeification — of the Emerald Isle on social media. In March 2023, Edebiri went viral for a Letterboxd interview where she joked, in a fake Irish accent, about playing Jenny the Donkey in the Oscar-nominated film The Banshees of Inisherin. Her new nationality was quickly embraced by social media and even the Irish Times.

The past two awards seasons have seen the film industry embrace Irish talent in a way that hasn’t been replicated since the end of the 20th century. Christopher Shannon, an assistant professor of history at Christendom University and the author of Bowery to Broadway: The American Irish in Classic Hollywood Cinema, notes that the closest precedent is the 1990s, “when Irish actors from Ireland such as Daniel Day-Lewis and Liam Neeson became stars.”

Social media has played into this Irish invasion, with users fangirling over actors like Paul Mescal, Barry Keoghan, Andrew Scott, and Cillian Murphy. All of these men have been recognized for their work in critically acclaimed and/or popular films in 2023. Cillian Murphy is nominated for (and forecast to win) an Oscar for his role in Oppenheimer.

Irish film actors have long made significant contributions to Hollywood, from Maureen O’Hara’s iconic run during the Golden Age to Michael Fassbender emerging as a leading man in the 2010s. And in recent years, actress Saoirse Ronan has notably been holding it down for young Irish movie stars. However, this new male-driven phenomenon likely stems from the convergence of the two online trends: an overwhelming fan appetite for male celebrities in the “internet boyfriend” era, and a growing interest in Irish culture. The result is a super-online (and horny) generation of Hibernophiles.

Irish men weren’t always America’s sweethearts

The idea of Irish men as particularly sexy has been on the rise in recent years — at the very least since 2015, when Fifty Shades of Grey starring County Down native Jamie Dornan was released. But the modern romanticization of Irish men doesn’t seem to be pegged to one film or moment in time, and a cursory Google search pulls up a slew of articles declaring the purported........

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