Ross O'Carroll-Kelly was invented to satirise Dublin rugby culture. But he's all too real for some people, creator Paul Howard tells Mary Hannigan.
Paul Howard is beginning to wonder quite what he has created. When he unleashed Ross O'Carroll-Kelly on unsuspecting Sunday Tribune readers five years ago, his intention, he says, was to "have a bit of fun, hold up a huge mirror to south Dublin ... and really get under these people's skin". If anyone had looked in the mirror and had seen Ross staring back, they really should have been rather alarmed. A "schools rugby legend, roysh" from Foxrock, spoilt by his well-to-do-parents, his only interests in life were "scoring the birds" and living off Daddy's money. Life only became tricky for Ross when he discovered that "you can't, like, sit the Leaving Cert four times - well, that put a focking spanner in the works".
Howard believed he had created the ultimate south Dublin monster. But he began to sense he was not achieving his objective of getting under these people's skin when the principal of Blackrock College rang and invited him to talk to his transition-year students. "I just thought: something's gone wrong here," he says.
Rather than examining Ross O'Carroll-Kelly's life and responding in a horrified "Oh! My! God!" kind of way, it would appear that some of his "contemporaries" are lost in admiration.
At a recent book signing, Howard was told by one Ross devotee that he and his friends had recreated an O'Carroll-Kelly moment by driving around housing estates in "Tallaghtfornia" shouting "affluence!" through the sun roof of their car.
Does he find this, well, alarming?
"I do, because when I write it it's satire, but these kids actually think I'm glorifying Ross's life! I'm taking the piss out of them, not Tallaghtfornia!"
The evidence mounts. Ross's mother, who, apart from campaigning for Ringsend to be redesignated "Dublin 4E", helped the push for Funderland to be moved to the northside. "I get letters from people saying 'you're quite right, Funderland shouldn't be out here.' It's incredible, but very funny. A friend of mine works in a bookshop in the Stephen's Green Centre. He says on a Saturday afternoon five or six of them will show up, all wearing the Ross uniform, Henri Lloyd jackets, Chinos, Dubes, Ralph Lauren shirts with the collars up, and baseball caps. They'll stand around reading the book, laughing out loud, then one will say 'Oh! My! God! That is so Tiernan.' Nobody sees themselves in this."
Ross O'Carroll-Kelly was born when Howard, a leading sports journalist, spent a season following the Leinster Schools rugby Cup. "The idea was to write a piece about the culture; it's an amazing little world. I just wanted to do a fly-on-the-wall thing, have a look at what goes on, but there were legal problems with it because you're writing about underage sex, underage drinking, and about people who can afford to sue you. So I thought it would be a bit of fun to do a small column. It started to generate mail in a way that a normal sports piece never would - within a year Ross was getting Christmas cards and debs invites. It just got bigger and bigger so they moved it from the sports pages to the main paper and it just became a monster, literally, in Ross's case."
O'Brien Press reckoned the columns could be turned into a book. They were right. The latest of four books, PS, I Scored the Bridesmaids, sits alongside The Da Vinci Code and Bridget Jones in the bestsellers list. Bridget Jones and Ross O'Carroll-Kelly? If only they could meet.
"These people have been ripe for satirising for years," says Howard of Ross's world. "Comedy in Ireland has always been about satirising the working classes, the Roddy Doyle school, or people from the country - it's hilarious that people aren't from Dublin, isn't it? If you get the Dart into town any morning there's a whole comedy show happening in front of you, performed in American accents. It's like an episode of Friends. My problem sometimes is getting out of the Ross language. I sat down to write up an interview with Graham Kavanagh [an Irish footballer] a couple of weeks ago and I wrote the word 'roysh'. I just stopped and asked myself: what are you doing?
"But Ross is just some light relief after all those pieces you have to write on drugs in sport and all that, stuff that just makes you very cynical and weary, really. He has become such a cult figure now, I'd feel guilty if I stopped writing it. I love it; it's the most fun I've ever had with writing. And the biggest thrill is when you see someone somewhere reading your book and giggling. Or even when they shout 'roysh' at you when you're walking down Grafton Street."