Paul Howard: Ten things I’ve learned writing Ross O’Carroll-Kelly

Paul Howard has been writing about the adventures of his south Dublin rugby jock for 23 years. As a collection of his best columns is published, he shares the things he has learned about Ireland, comedy and writing. Illustrations by Alan Clarke

1 In the real Ireland, Charles O'Carroll-Kelly would never have gone to jail. In the first column to appear in The Irish Times in 2007, Ross's old man was sent down for three years for corrupting the planning process. A script editor would call this a false beat. I know enough about Ireland now to know that he would have been acquitted or the trial would have collapsed due to a technicality. I regularly kick myself over this storyline.

2 Peter Cook said, "The golden age for satire was the Weimar Republic – and look how it prevented the rise of Hitler." Satire doesn't bring down governments. It's hard to say that it changes anything at all. The best you can hope for, I've discovered, is Molière's aspiration "to amuse men while gently correcting them". I never expected the targets of the Ross books to become my audience. I reflect on this every time I'm invited to a yacht club, or a golf club or a south Dublin rugby school to read. I wanted to infuriate these people – but now I am their courtroom jester.

3 I have managed to change the world in only one small way. I have (almost certainly) been responsible for the demise of the name Ross in Ireland. In 1998, the year the character first appeared, it was the 39th most popular name for boys born in Ireland, according to the Central Statistics Office, with 171 babies being named Ross that year. Its popularity has fallen almost every year since then. In 2019 it was 244th on the list, with just 19 babies being named Ross. Over the years, I have met quite a number of Rosses – and one Rossa – who have told me how difficult I made life for them by giving the character their name. I am told on good authority that Ross O'Carroll, the former Dublin hurler and footballer, often has trouble persuading strangers on the phone that, yes, that really is his real name.

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4 The Leinster Schools Rugby Senior Cup isn't a matter of life and death – it is far more important than that. The first solicitor's letter I ever received as a sports journalist was from the father of a schools cup player whom I denied a try in my coverage of a match. As a matter of fact, in my two-paragraph report, I gave his try to one of his teammates. The stiffly worded letter demanded a "retraction, correction and apology", although the question of damages was generously waived. I was never entrusted by the newspaper to cover a schools rugby match again – but the father became the inspiration for Charles O'Carroll-Kelly.

5 Ross's "real" mother is Maeve Binchy. When I was 15, I went to a talk she gave for aspiring writers in Dún Laoghaire Shopping Centre, where she explained how her habit of eavesdropping was the source of many of her best stories. For more than 20 years, I have copied Maeve's modus operandi. To this day, in the pockets of old clothes or tucked into books, I still find bus tickets, receipts and scraps of paper on to which I scribbled notes from conversations overheard on buses, trains or in coffee shops. About 10 years ago, I started to write them down into a notebook, which I'll open if I'm in need of inspiration when I sit down to write my weekly column, always at five o'clock on a Monday morning. One day on the Dart, for instance, I overheard two teachers having a serious discussion about classical musicals that could be given a south Dublin twist for their school's end of year show. Ten years later, the notes I took were the basis of Honor's South Side Story, a musical about the bitter gang rivalry between the children from a non-denominational school that respects all religions with the same ambivalence and a nearby Gaelscoil school, where the children are taught that only Catholics who speak fluent Irish can get into heaven. Dozens of storylines, as well as conversations and characters, have come to me from earwigging.

6 What makes south Dublin people so funny is a question I obviously think about a great deal. The best answer I've come up with is lack of self-awareness. My favourite comedy characters have always been those with a sense of themselves that is sharply at odds with the way the rest of the world sees them. Alan Partridge and David Brent are two examples. There is a certain kind of southsider – perhaps best exemplified by Ross's mother, Fionnuala – who simply lacks the embarrassment gene. The comedy isn't in how obnoxious they are, I've learned, it's in how oblivious they are to it.

7 In 100 years' time, everyone in Ireland will speak with an American accent. This was something that the late University College Dublin English professor Terry Dolan once told me, although he later revised the timeline downwards to 50 years. Through the language of the column, I have tried to reflect the rapid evolution happening in the way English is spoken in this part of the world. I used to use "roysh" as a sort of linguistic crutch, but I dispensed with it about seven years ago because it had become a catchphrase and strangers had started to shout it at me in airports and in the street. I experimented for a while with ways to represent that mode of speaking where someone raises the intonation at the end of the sentence so that it sounds like a question even when it's not. In the end, I decided the best way was to, like, italicise pointlessly emphasised words? And also to put, like, a question mark at the end of the sentence? It used to be only teenagers who spoke in this way. Now, they do it in the Dáil.

8 The humour in Ross does not travel well beyond Ireland – and sometimes even within Ireland. I was once invited to read some columns at a literary event in The Rock Bar on the Falls Road in Belfast. I don't think anyone had a clue what was going on and it was a great relief to everyone, not least me, when it was suggested I sit down and we all watch Katie Taylor fight in the Olympic final. The reason it doesn't travel well, I think, is because the humour, especially the cultural references, are a bit parochial. In 2003 a publisher in Moscow decided to translate The Orange Mocha-Chip Frappuccino Years into Russian. I had many colourful conversations with the translator, attempting to explain to him the local significance of everything from Donnybrook Fair to Shanahan's on the Green to Dubarry sailing shoes. After a few weeks, I felt that he'd really started to understand all the nuances of the world. The only thing he couldn't get his head around was the idea that anyone could become a hero among their peers by playing rugby. So in the Russian version of the story, Ross O'Carroll-Kelly played basketball. Happily, the edition never saw the light of day.

9 Sometimes Ross imitates real life but sometimes it feels like real life is imitating Ross. In 2007, when the Aviva Stadium was being rebuilt, I wrote a column about Charles and his friends being transported to and from Croke Park by bus so that they could continue to enjoy their traditional prematch drinks in Ballsbridge. It started as a joke but it turned out to be a lucrative business idea – perhaps the last of the Celtic Tiger era. Sometimes, I think about the dry robe protests, the tape recording of the Rock boys "sending it" that went viral and the campaign to have Terenure redesignated as Dublin 4, and I realise that so many elements of south Dublin life are already beyond satire.

10 Readers pay far greater attention than writers sometimes realise. This is something I discovered a couple of years ago when I tried to slip into my weekly column the fact that Ross had triplet sons. I received a couple of hundred messages from people demanding to know where they came from and why they had never been mentioned before. Brian, Johnny and Leo had featured in at least two books at that point, but it's always been a challenge for me to maintain a narrative consistency between the column and the books without giving away spoilers. At the same time, I'm also aware that the weekly column and the books have different readerships with very different tastes. The column is read by a lot of what I would characterise as golf club mums and yacht club dads, many of whom are relatively new to the character and read it at the breakfast table. The readers of the books, on the other hand, tend to have followed him from the early days and are a bit more used to Ross's more undergraduate humour. Rachel Pierce has edited all 20 Ross O'Carroll-Kelly books. When we sat down to choose the columns for the collection, one thing struck her about the thousand or so stories I've written for The Irish Times: "There are no sex scenes." Sorry, I should have said: spoiler alert.

RO'CK of Ages - From Boom Days to Zoom Days is published by Sandycove