When I first moved to London, I went searching for Shane. Literally, as well as metaphorically, spiritually, aesthetically. I found him, on each count. Where the former was concerned, at Highgate’s Boogaloo pub. I’d heard that’s where he was getting pissed at the time. I was an hour or two early, the place was still shut, but peering through the glass I could make out a bloke that looked just like Mr MacGowan asleep sprawled across the sofa. My god, could it be? I came back once it had opened, and sure enough there he was, propping up the bar surrounded by bevvy. People forever buying him drinks. The idea crossed my mind. Too shy. Also, he’s got enough drinks. I was skint, still at that point in my life where I’d bring my own cans to the pub to save dollar.

I’d loved The Pogues back in Ulster where I grew up. They’d long been a fixture in my household. I recall buying my mum the “Best Of” for Christmas one year, at her request. Weird that, when you’re a kid and you don’t have any money. Your parents choose the gift and pay for it. Sort of pointless. Anyway, I remember feeling confused at the sight of this snaggle-toothed fella on the sleeve clutching a guitar, grinning at me. There was an immediate difference between this guy and Take That or George Michael, my mum’s other favourites. He was imperfect, and proudly so by the looks of it. When I stuck it on the stereo the bafflement only thickened. This man could not sing. My mum wasn’t into punk rock. She was into pop music. Shane had crossed boundaries that, at the time, aged 10, I had no idea existed.

Once adolescence kicked in, it started to make sense. This wayward Irish rebel thing. This not being able to sing. Living in Ireland, though, I was just one among many. I preferred The Clash. It felt harsher, had fuzzy electric guitars, it therefore felt more real. I was on my way to London come hell or high water. London Calling was therefore my anthem.

Once I arrived, they switched places. I had to carve out an identity for myself in the Big Smoke. Irish. I was going to be thoroughly Irish. There weren’t many Irishmen at UCL. I took to drinking severely and listening to Red Roses for Me at a volume that nobody on campus could tolerate. I fell so deeply in love with Shane’s lyricism that, as my life slowly started to resemble one of his jovial nightmares, I took it to be a matter of pride, of authenticity. I wanted to step into one of those fables and remain there, where — impossibly — things going horribly wrong could somehow generate festivity.

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My first attempt at a band — “The Saudi’s” — was more than just a little Pogues-inflected. I didn’t have a clue how to write a melody, but I fancied myself a wordsmith. If you lack a certain cynicism, once you become obsessed enough with a writer, you can’t help but fancy yourself a wordsmith. I would rewrite the words to tunes on Pogues records. An embarrassing first pass, I recall turning “Waxie’s Dargle” into “The Yardie from Killarney”, a song about the only other Irish-Algerian-Londoner I’d ever met.

That was my pal Ronnie, whose floor I was living on at the time, sharing a double mattress with my little brother after flunking out of uni. Ronnie had just come out of prison. This made him prime fodder for writing a Pogues-inspired tune, a second-generation immigrant ex-con. A perennial outsider. We used to spend our afternoons folding drug wraps for him out of lottery cards whilst listening to “Transmetropolitan”. Life can’t help but imitate art. Art has style — it’s seductive. When the evening rolled around, we’d terrorise east London loaded on Buckfast, a bottomless sack of cheap pingers at our disposal.

The band went nowhere. Well, almost nowhere. Spider Stacy, The Pogues’ tin whistle player, left a flattering comment on our Myspace page one time. I held onto this fact for years. It’s these fragments of acknowledgment that keep you buoyant through the deep tundra of namelessness. Spider was into it. It’s still possible. The follow-up project to that first band wound up sharing a stage with The Pogues in Thetford Forest roughly 10 years later. Shane was obviously long since passed his prime. He had a telly prompter for the lyrics, which I found pretty funny. Who doesn’t get the order of the verses muddled up on “Dirty Old Town”? They work whichever way you sling them. He’d do three or four songs then disappear backstage for a fag or a sit down, I’m not sure. There was still this glow, this presence, this living, breathing sense of history emanating from the dude.

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What is it with the Irish and language? I am of course only a plastic paddy, or a cultural paddy in part. I was born in England, my mum’s from Yorkshire, my dad’s Algerian, but for the most part I grew up over there. Six years in Galway, six in Scotland, then another six in County Tyrone before moving to London at 18. Freud allegedly stated that the Irish were immune to psychotherapy, that you could divide the population of the world into two camps: people, and Irish people. I’m going to take a mutton-fisted stab in the dark and suggest that in Ireland, there’s less of a fixation on practicality where words are concerned. There’s an element of play in every lexicon, but with the mick, it’s proportionally off the chart. Maybe this is because it pisses it down all the time. With so much of life spent indoors, they have little choice but to turn everything that comes out of their mouths into a kind of game.

Splice this tendency with the unfortunate proximity to Imperial London and you have a recipe for a world-beating poetics of opposition. A poetics that can’t switch itself off. The contradictions in the national character come too thick and fast to settle on an answer. Hedonistic yet devout, thick-skinned yet suprasensual, foul-tempered yet stubbornly polite. Shane described it thus: “I’m following the Irish tradition of life, the human way of life. Cram as much pleasure into life and rail against the pain you have to suffer as a result. Or scream and rant with the pain and wait for it to be taken away with beautiful pleasure.”

Conflict is the engine of creativity. The Irish spirit has a greater capacity for irresolution than most. One need only look at the wild success of their diaspora to bolster this generalisation. In The Pogues, in the voice of Shane MacGowan, we hear this capacity at fever pitch, stretched to its ecstatic limit.

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There is nothing beyond acceptance in his vernacular. An unequivocal affirmation of life in all its hoary, pernicious, astounding, violently glorious detail. Arch shit-stirrer Mark E. Smith criticised him on account of his being a peddler of “show tunes”. This is to miss the point entirely. It’s the familiarity of the sonic palette, the conservatism of it, crossbred with the surrealist hell-scapes of the vocal performance and lyrics that render it untouchable, if not exactly avant garde. The best writers reveal to us what we already know. Shane showed us a version of Irish history, and of the immigrant experience especially, which we all had a sense of regardless. What a relief to hear it rendered with such savage glee, honesty and compassion. He will be sorely missed.

Not only was Father Ted one of the few successful TV representations of Ireland, it was made during Ireland’s version of the Swinging Sixties, our flux decade of the Nineties. The accelerating collapse of the Church and the exposure of longstanding political corruption coincided with the dawn of the Celtic Tiger years, lending peripheral Ireland a sense of self-conscious modernity. It was a unique national turning point, where our 19th-century past seemed to co-exist with our 21st-century future. In reflecting this upheaval, Father Ted has become not just a social historical document, but a portent of where Ireland stands today.

It’s not the sort of thing that national epics are normally made of. The programme is about three Catholic Priests — Fathers Ted Crilly, Dougal McGuire, and Jack Hackett — on Craggy Island, a remote settlement off the west coast of Ireland. All three priests have been exiled to this purgatory by the terrifying Bishop Len Brennan (their misdemeanours are never referred to directly, but Ted often makes oblique reference to the fact that “the funds were only resting in my account”). Most episodes revolve around an absurdist version of Church life, Ted’s schemes to escape the island and their interactions with the island’s townsfolk.

Rarely for domestic Irish TV, it was a sitcom written by Irish people and it was set within a central Irish institution, the Catholic Church. And the dearth of representations of Irish people in entertainment meant it crystallised many Irish archetypes for the first time. Ireland itself hadn’t always been a welcoming place for satirists. Ted star Dermot Morgan knew this well — his major project before Ted had been a political comedy radio show named Scrap Saturday, which upset all the wrong people, and was eventually cancelled amid allegations of political interference.

Unlike Scrap Saturday, Ted never sought to be political or self-consciously “relevant”. But Craggy Island is a capsule of Irish life at this time of major social change — not least for gender relations and the Church. Take one married couple, John and Mary, who own the corner shop on Craggy Island. They contrive to show a winsome, loving front to the priest whenever they encounter him, but turn to violent bickering once his back is turned. At one point, Mary tries to drown John in a bucket of water; at another, Father Ted comes into the shop and finds John has locked Mary in a cupboard. When he leaves, they’re arguing over a shotgun.

This peck-and-scratch marriage is still funny, but in 2023 the laughter it provokes is nervous. It’s a product of an Irish society still processing the reality of divorce, only legalised by a referendum in Ireland in 1995, the same year Ted first aired. Though it was not uncommon at that time for people to separate, the divorce campaign had been ugly and emotional. One billboard for No bore the slogan “Hello divorce, goodbye daddy”. The referendum was passed by the tiny margin of 9,000 votes.

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Divorce was only one step in the very gradual withering of religious power in Ireland — far more gradual than the rest of Europe. Remember that abortion was only legalised in Ireland five years ago. When Ted was broadcast, the Church was formally still one of the central pillars of Irish life, but its authority rang hollow. Priests often felt like administrators of a vanished country. And on remote Craggy, Ted, Dougal and Jack mirror this directly. All good sitcoms feature characters who are trapped, but Ted is doubly so: first on his island; and second in an institution people are coming to see as irrelevant. He is still an essential member of the community, more than just a ceremonial functionary for weddings and funerals. But it’s just not clear what the essential thing he does is anymore, beyond being a common reference point that deserves token respect. 

Ted and Ted therefore stand at a crossroads, and capture the more fundamental social change in Ireland at this time: the collapse in respect for older establishment hierarchies generally. These were not unlike the changes many other countries had experienced in the Sixties, a meritocratic, levelling upheaval against an entitled ruling elite. In a symbolic Late Late Show appearance not long after Ted ended, Irish EU Commissioner Padraig Flynn terminated his career by seeming to brag inappropriately about the extent of his pay-packet, and the attendant difficulties of maintaining multiple houses, housekeepers and cars, and extensive foreign travel. Such blithe venality had been deemed impassable.

The insistent pulse of Irish political life in the Nineties was a series of tribunals on corruption in public life, covering subjects such as tax evasion and illegal payments to politicians. The names of those tribunals — Flood, Mahon, Moriarty, McCracken — are unknown in the UK. But for an Irish person who was politically conscious in 1997, these were seismic events. The Mahon tribunal in particular lasted 15 years and created an endless and era-defining thrum of news stories about shady political dealings that rarely left the front pages. It created the sense that Ireland was run by an elite who fattened themselves while the public starved, but who had finally been exposed — though the extent of their punishment was often limited, pace Ted, to a kick up the arse.

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Even within its small world, Father Ted finds room for these hierarchical upheavals. Bishop Brennan is the terrifying figure at pinnacle of Ted’s world, but his personal failings ultimately allow Ted to, if not topple him, then at least manoeuvre around his influence. On one occasion, he successfully blackmails Brennan when he uncovers a tape showing the Bishop frolicking on the beach with a woman and acting paternally towards a young child. Rarely for the show, this closely parodies the real-life case of the Bishop of Galway, Eamonn Casey, whose secrets were exposed in yet another bombshell Late Late Show interview in 1993.

But perhaps what’s most interesting in Ted are the issues it doesn’t linger on. For obvious reasons — it’s a zany comedy — neither the Northern Irish peace process nor abortion get much airtime. Homosexuality, only legalised in Ireland three years before Ted went on the air, is also largely absent. (The closest the programme came was its introduction of Graham Norton to an unsuspecting world.) Similarly, while the Nineties was also the decade in which Ireland became a country of net immigration, Father Ted remains monoethnic and monocultural — note its famous “I hear you’re a racist now, Father” episode, in which Ted offends Chinese family with an ill-advised impression. But it’s a “Ted, you big eejit” moment, not a herald that Ireland is changing.

These unconscious elisions, as we might now read them, draw attention to the pace and scale of change in Ireland since the programme’s finale, in the passage of barely one generation. The Ireland of the last year — which witnessed immigration protests and the controversy around gender self-ID laws — was unimaginable in 1998, and probably a decade later as well. In this regard, an interesting companion to Father Ted is the 1993 film The Snapper, adapted from Roddy Doyle’s novel and directed by Stephen Frears. It’s the story of a young woman who becomes pregnant outside marriage and the turmoil that ensues in her community. But it ends on a positive note (with its main character and reconciled family crowded round the new baby), and presents a picture of an organic Dublin community that is unimaginably plainer and closer-knit than today.

For anyone who grew up in Ireland, especially Dublin, in the Nineties, returning to Ted and The Snapper is thus a profound and melancholy experience — like looking at a picture of yourself from before a war. This was the genius behind its surreal comedy. Like Ireland, it had its feet in two worlds, occupying that strange place when, as the earth shakes, a chasm opens up between the past and the future.