Brace yourself, Brigid. The current Irish-chic in the US has spread to television drama shows. I'd only just got over Tom Cruise mangling an Irish accent in Far and Away. And now the upcoming television season will be awash in enough embarrassing stereotypes about the Irish to make Barry Fitzgerald wince.
There is a raft of new shows about Irish Catholic working-class families from Boston, New York and Chicago, tightly knit clans with deep roots and fierce loyalties.
Why can't we ever be loosely knit with shallow roots and casual loyalties?
There is no use boiling your cabbage twice. But this is Hollywood, the least original place on earth, where they boil their cabbage endlessly. And then serve it in syndication.
Dialogue in the shows, previewed here for television critics, is sprinkled with phrases and lines such as "Me boyo"; "Mikey would be proud"; "Your priest brother, he ain't safe tonight"; and "This is not going to help my hangover". There are redheads and green cable-knit sweaters. There are saintly mothers and drunken daughters. There are Irish bars with pints of Guinness and Boston Celtics banners. Casseroles abound, but there is not a glass of chardonnay in sight.
There are enough Donnybrooks to make Jerry Springer - not to mention Northern Ireland - look restful. And you'll hear the mournful tin whistle that was so annoying in Titanic blow through soundtracks until you want to kick in a stained glass window.
Maureen O'Hara even showed up at the TV press tour, as though on cue. I asked the still-beautiful O'Hara, here to promote her CBS movie, Cab to Canada, whether the cascade of Irish stereotypes bothered her. The woman who saw her share of drinking and fighting when she starred in the John Ford classic The Quiet Man replied: "No-o-o-o-o. The Irish people are Celtic Latins. You can see the same kinds of things in Italian and Spanish families. But we all make up before we go to bed."
Perhaps. But haven't the networks gone a wee bit overboard?
CBS's Turks is about a family of Chicago cops. In an opening scene, the mother, who has an anachronistic brogue, tells her youngest son she is going to stop at the church to talk to Father Tom. "Your father has his work," she says of her husband. "And I have the Church. We all find comfort in different ways."
NBC's Trinity centres on the McCallisters of New York's Hell's Kitchen. They include Bobby, a police detective; Kevin, a parish priest; Liam, a union organiser; and Amanda, a teacher at a Catholic school who keeps her first communion picture by her bed, gets drunk and hides the shame of being pregnant and unwed. In one scene, Anne Meara, the red-headed matriarch, stands on a fire escape and calls down to her grown children, who are playing "a grudge match" on the basketball court: "Come in for dinner, guys, the potatoes are getting cold."
CBS's To Have and to Hold is about the McGrails, a Boston family with three cops and one fireman. This show has an original twist. CBS refers to the family as a tightly-knit "brood" rather than a tightly knit "clan". The Ma in this show also has a brogue and a temper, so bad she breaks her Home Sweet Home plate over a drunken son's head and then makes the sign of the cross.
The show can't even get its stereotypes straight, at least when it comes to those supposedly fierce McGrail loyalties. At one point, Ma testifies in court against her cop son, Sean, saying he was too drunk to make an arrest. An Irish mother would sooner look on the bright side of something than testify against a son.
Costello is a Fox comedy about a feisty Irish barmaid in a south Boston pub with pictures of J.F.K. and shamrocks, where the guys knock heads and put down women, and the women just knock heads. The comedian, Sue Costello, playing Sue Murphy, interprets Riverdance: "You just have to be Irish and have no joy from the waist up." Murphy's father is a quick-tempered carpenter named Spud and her mother is "fiercely loyal".
For your sins, US TV executives, say four Our Fathers and three Hail Marys. And pray for a little originality.