The brogue has a certain cachet with the ladies, and a cupla focal can sometimes turn a pretty head, but the Irish have a dismal reputation when it comes to sex.
Maybe it's the climate, the cold and rain, that puts a damper on sweet romance. Then again, an Irishman's notion of a pick-up line involves getting drunk out of his mind and then hoping for the best.
A word of warning to any ladies who might be looking for love in the wilds of County Limerick. That sot who's pitching inebriated woo at you is hoping you'll feel sorry for an eejit and give him your number. It's Irish courtship at its most pathetic.
It comes as no surprise, then, that an Irishman has won the Literary Review award for bad sex in fiction. Rowan Somerville has done the nation proud by taking the prize for some truly dreadful passages in his novel The Shape of Her.
He joins super-author Jonathan Franzen in being unable to write about sex without resorting to bizarre metaphors and unintentionally hilarious verbiage.
Not that it's an easy thing, to compose words to describe a moment of intimacy. Yet authors continue to put sex into their novels because it's a normal human activity and it would only be normal for characters in a book to engage in sex at some point in their journey.
That this award went to a man with family in Donegal does nothing for the single Irish male, who is already stigmatized by centuries of sexual repression. At least there's some hope to be found in Hollywood, where the brooding, quiet but handsome Irish lad gets the girl at the end of the romantic comedy.
Ireland is just like in the movies, ladies. And you can't believe everything you read.
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