Cherry Tomato Bridge 🍅🌉

So, What’s the Craic?

The Craic returns this Friday evening, bringing you news of Irish antics & achievements at home and abroad. If you like this wee newsletter, pass it on to friends and family by asking them to sign up here.

News from Home

Cherry Tomato Bridge. Cliffs of Moher? Guinness Storehouse? Kilmainham Gaol? Nah, nah, and nah. The top attraction in Ireland at the moment is ‘Cherry Tomato Bridge.’ What is it? Some sliced-up tomatoes sitting on Drumcondra Bridge, Dublin. It’s become an internet sensation, and it has evolved into a tourist attraction and a kind of shrine to, er, tomatoes. We don’t know why it’s caught on or why people now seem to be leaving tomatoes and ketchup on the bridge in tribute to their new red spheroid gods, but here we are. Perfectly pointless and absurd: Perfectly Irish.

Our Hero. Englishman Len Lavelle has created a mini-Irish pub in his backyard shed. The diminutive boozer, Bucko’s Bar, has been crowned the UK’s best at the International Backyard Bar Awards. Lavelle designed the bar based on his childhood memories of trips to Ireland. It’s fecking class. You can check it out here.

The Newest Saint. The life of Derry woman Clare Crockett could make for a fine novel. She was an actor and self-confessed party girl before she heard the call from the church while in Spain in 2000. She became a nun, worked around the world, and tragically died in an earthquake in Ecuador in 2016. The lads at the Vatican have now started the ball rolling for Clare to become a Saint.

Happy Birthday. There are about half a million Argentines with Irish heritage (you could probably send us over a few soccer players), and the South American country is also home to the oldest continuously published newspaper for the Irish diaspora, the Southern Cross. It’s celebrating its 150th anniversary this year.

The Irish Influence

You know we try to throw out a few Irish words and phrases in Cúpla Focal each week, but the truth is, we are not experts (you’ve probably worked that out). Anyway, for the Irish Influence this week, we wanted to shine a light on several Irish social media accounts that promote the Irish language. These Gaeilgeoirí (Irish speakers) don’t just make learning Irish fun, they have become historians and custodians of a language that is always under threat of extinction. So a shout-out to Irish with Mollie and Gaeilge Vibes on Instagram, Gaeilge Le Jane and Éadaoin Fitzmaurice on TikTok (will TikTok still be around in a few days? 😲), and the brilliant The Irish For on both X and BlueSky. Finally, we couldn’t do a list of Gaeilgeoirí Influencers without mentioning Friend of the Craic and all-round legend, Vivienne O’Callaghan.

Cúpla Focal

Bualadh bos {Boo-La-Bus) is one of those Gaeilge phrases that’s authentic Irish yet also used frequently as slang by non-Irish speakers. It literally means “hitting palm,” so it can be used to call a round of applause, but most of us just use it to say, “well done.”

Blast from the Past

In our view, one of the most distinctive things about the late great Dolores O’Riordan was the fact her mezzo-soprano voice never lost the lilting Irish accent. A lot of rock vocalists sing in ‘American,’ but the Cranberries frontwoman always embraced her Limerickness. O’Riordan passed away on January 15th, 2018 (aged just 46!). Selling over 50 million albums with the Cranberries, she became an icon of alternative rock across the globe. We found this little clip of her singing Fleetwood Mac’s Go Your Own Way. It’s raw, edgy, distinctive, and unapologetic. Like Dolores herself.

And One Last Thing….

Going to an authentic Irish pub is usually at the top of most tourist’s wish lists when visiting the island. But what if there were none left when you got there? Over 2,000 pubs have closed in Ireland since 2005 (that’s a lot for a wee country), and a huge number of bars and restaurants have been under strain due to the rising inflation we have seen since 2022. The hospitality industry is in critical condition, and for Ireland, the pub is both a national resource and part of cultural heritage. We don’t have Taj Mahals or Empire State Buildings here, but we have the best pubs in the world. The new government has finally come up with a plan to help. It will cut VAT (a type of sales tax) on hospitality businesses by a third to 9% in a bid to stop the rot. Critics say it does not go far enough, but it’s at least reassuring that the government recognizes there’s a problem in the first place.

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The Craic is brought to you by the lads from the Shift app. Shift is a social network for the Irish everywhere, launching in 2025: GetTheShift.app.