The Philosophy of Immersion Posting — Part 2
This is the second of a two part series on ‘Immersion Posting’, a characteristically hackneyed, kitsch, nostalgic, and reference prone sub-genre of Irish Comedy.
Part one can be found here.
90’s TV
The Immersion Poster’s worldview is shaped by two TV shows more than any other - The Simpsons & Father Ted. Both shows have become iconic from Irish under 50’s, airing in the 1990’s, just when trust in authority figures was beginning to decline to due to corruption scandals in both the Church & Political life.
The Simpsons is the quintessential 90’s show, marked by a worldview of cynicism, irreverence & juvenility. The show aimed to critique American culture, in particular the Nuclear Family, at a time when raging against the “traditional family life” was seen as cool, new, and representing the future. Before the Simpsons, earlier TV shows would idealise the family, portraying it as an unalloyed good. Most authority figures in the Simpsons are portrayed as incompetent, absurd or sinister, with much of the humour making them the butt of the joke, and pointing out hypocrisy. From the point of view of Homer, think of his boss, his Father, his local church pastor, his local barman, the Mayor, the police, former Presidents, every rich character. Homer himself works a very well paid and important job, and has landed it not by competence but by sheer luck and a lack of any oversight.
One of the most iconic examples of the Simpsons shaping the worldview of it’s younger viewers is the “Won’t Somebody Think of the Children” quote, melodramatically said by Helen Lovejoy, wife of the local Reverend, which is now always invoked as a mocking pejorative whenever someone invokes the protection of children in a debate on culture or politics. The 90s American culture took a cynical view of traditional Christian values such as innocence. The call to protect these values would be seen as a moral panic; the person calling for this would be seen as either naïve or disingenuous. In the Sunday Independent, Carol Hunt called the use of the phrase "Helen Lovejoy syndrome", saying “it is often invoked in reference to hypothetical children rather than real children affected by a problem.” This line is still regularly referenced online in 2024.
Religious characters are almost always portrayed in a negative light. Take Ned Flanders, take his sheltered, naive and pathetic sons at the bottom of the social hierarchy of their peer group. Catholics actually receive a surprisingly favourable portrayal, although this is most likely due to the fact that because the Simpsons is set in the world of WASP America, Catholics become an exotic other, to be shown as more interesting and fun at the expense to the boring, puritanical WASPs.
The legacy of the Simpsons can be seen in things like “Irish Simpsons Fans”, a page for memes on Ireland using Simpsons clips, which started out as just implicitly liberal, before eventually become explicitly political, with the page owner become a loud and proud Leftist raging against “FFG”. A fairly standard joke seen on the page is portraying Fianna Fail/Fine Gael as Mr Burns, meaning they are corrupt and greedy. However the page’s heyday of influence looks to have passed, as even the youngest generation of Simpsons fans being of the age of having children (but probably not buying houses unfortunately), and it doesn’t seem like Gen-Z is continuing the fandom. When even Reddit Ireland is calling out ISF as “very preachy/woke”, you know the decline has arrived.
Father Ted makes the same attack a similar attack on authority figures, directly rather than indirectly, with the comedy primarily focusing on the Catholic Church, during the pivotal decade of the 90’s when revelations of sex scandal sent shockwaves through Irish life, from the Bishop of Galway Eamonn Casey fathering a child (which is directly joked about in the show), to the numerous reports of priests guilty of pedophilia, and the attempted cover up by the Church hierachy.
Father Ted wasn’t the cause of the evaporation of religious faith among the young, but it did help shape the perceptions of the Church among the young coming of age during this time. This is most evident in how exceptionally iconic & ubiquitous so many of its quotes are, and how they are quoted to the point of eye-roll. Take for example the episode where Father Ted & Dougal stage a protest, with signs bearing “Careful Now” & “Down with this sort of thing” This scene is a classic example of the Immersion Poster style joke, of two doddering rural priests attempting to mimic a Western-style angry protest, but only coming across as bumbling, awkward, & strangely polite because of how Irish they are. In the scene, the priests’ protest ends up backfiring, causing more people are drawn in to see the film they are trying to suppress. How very Irish!
Like the Simpsons, Father Ted employs absurdist humor, and the priests of the show are usually portrayed as flawed, if not corrupt or hypocrites. The three main priests of the show are all consigned to Craggy Island for past wrong-doing - Father Jack for alcoholism & womanising, Dougal for accidentally ruining the lives of several nuns, and Ted’s own crime is alluded to as “the funds were only resting in my account”. Clearly these are not people worthy of much deference. The last joke is poetic, as whether intentional or not, from the late 90’s onwards there would be continuous revelations of corruption & personal enrichment among Irish politicians in government.
You can really see the lasting impression these TV shows have had in how your average Irish Millennial Left-Liberal will characterise politicians they despise. Your typical Left-Wing Shinner & Blindboy listener, more than anything else, will attempt to portray them as using politics just to enrich themselves personally, and they don’t actually believe the things they push for, it’s all just a cynical act. They will also try to find some example of hypocrisy, which can be seen in how they always chracterise sexual conservatives as closeted sex-pests or gays, despite what they may preach. This can be so formulaic and almost deranged, until you remember these people would have been in their late teens & early twenties sometime between the 90’s and early 2000s, and their political awakenings would have been coloured by The Simpsons, Father Ted, The Moriarty & McCracken Tribunals, and continuous revelations that seemingly a large number of Priests are actually paedophiles.
Self-Deprecation
While the Immersion Poster is overall less bitter than their British counterpart The Cockwomble, both share a significant level of cynicism towards the politics & major institutions to achieve great things. Whereas the British Liberal Millennial has an underlying anger, most Immersion Posting possesses a Hobbit mentality; its purveyors recede into the comfort blanket of kitsch before the prospect of grandiosity, and instead simply a people enjoying simple pleasures, jokes and having an absence of any grand designs, living in a society where nothing is too serious, but nothing exceptionally bad ever really happens.
It’s fairly apparent that no matter how endearing the Irish Mammy meme is, it’s fairly clear she is still mainly the butt of the joke, and a doddering, simple-minded figure deserving condescension. Some jokes in the Immersion Poster genre can basically boil down to “Irish Man dumb”. Any suggestions of the country doing something even mildly “out-there”, such as build a Nuclear power plant, is always met with the pessimistic refrain that goes something like: “ah shur Jaysus, are ya mad?! We’d make a bags of that! Leave that to the Germans or the Americans!” Etc.
However this worldview can itself have a negative impact on the country’s ability to govern competently and have high expectations of its leaders. While humility & self-criticism is a healthy thing, a country that sees itself as merely a buffoon who got where it is by luck or accident is unlikely to govern itself with the high standards those born in the West have come to see as the norm. Kenneth Clark noted that one of the main destroyers of civilisation is a lack of confidence in itself.
This view of incompetence is not completely baseless, as one might get the impression of when one sees the Dart was completed in 1984, and 40 years later very little public infrastructure has been built despite the Irish Economy 20-30 times the size it previously was. However one shouldn’t remain completely cynical, as the best example of Irish competence is the Irish Diaspora, in particular Irish America, which has conquered the very top of government & the private sector of what is by far the richest and most dynamic economy in the world. But it’s still possible for two men born and raised in Ireland to start Stripe, one of the most valuable private companies in the world, and Ireland still produces many other home-grown unicorn companies. Ireland continually produces generations of well educated & talented people, its perpetual problem is governing effectively enough to prevent them from leaving the country and moving abroad to make their way in life.
Looking to the Future
There seems to exist a tension between aspects of Irishness that Irish Millennials seem to love, while also being oblivious to the long term consequences of the worldviews they hold and political policies they largely support, such as Mass Immigration. There is clearly a love for Irishness in there, however imperfect or partial that Irishness is. How does this type of person view themselves in retirement? Do they imagine themselves somehow defaulting back to their grandparents? It is unclear, but seems very unlikely that they will turn into their Granny, a doting old woman with her house covered top to bottom in religious ornaments, married to a man who never leaves the house without a flat cap.
Ultimately this tension goes to the heart of the divide between Liberals & Conservatives, where Conservatives advocate for slow, gradual evolution over time, and hesitation against radical change, seeing culture as fragile & requiring careful cultivation. Liberals on the other hand do not the see as much of a danger, seeing one’s culture & traditions as either unimportant or much stronger than Conservatives would suggest. The American writer Will Herberg called humanism, the attempt to construct a Western morality divorced from religion a “cut flower culture”, saying the following:
“The attempt made in recent decades by secularist thinkers to disengage the moral principles of western civilization from their scripturally based religious context, in the assurance that they could live a life of their own as "humanistic" ethics, has resulted in our "cut flower culture." Cut flowers retain their original beauty and fragrance, but only so long as they retain the vitality that they have drawn from their now-severed roots; after that is exhausted, they wither and die.”
I can’t help thinking while reading this quote that it could surely also apply to this view of Irish culture and the associated memes.
Of aspects of Irish culture now separated from the old world and ecosystem that it sprang from. If Western societies in general live in a Christian afterglow, then 21st Century Ireland lives in a sort-of “Rural-Gaelic-Catholic” afterglow, and these tropes are what they see as remaining constant throughout. Irishness is seen here not through traditions but through quirks and mannerisms.
It must be asked whether Immersion Posting will continue to be a thing with younger generations, or will it mainly be associated with those who were young in the 90s & 2000s. There are signs the joke is at the end of its days. Does a person who is 16 (meaning born in 2008) watching Father Ted even understand many of the references? Take the “Down with this sort of thing” joke, that Irish people can’t do a serious protest because they can’t act the part, and are too culchie & polite about the whole thing, lacking the seriousness & ideological fervour of protests in other western countries. Clearly this is no longer the case, given the last few years of protests over anything from BLM to Abortion to “Gender-based violence” to Gaza, which look identical to protests in America & Britain. Part of the joke is the funny old Irish man clumsily living in the western world, but surely at some point, the Irish man becomes so Westernised that the joke no longer exists. Does anyone seriously think that the group “Mammies for Trans Rights” actually represents the usual Irish Mammy meme?
It’s worth closing with why these tropes remain so endearing for Millennials, in a time of youth emigration and what seems like a permanent housing crisis that may lock this generation out of home ownership permanently. As Diane Negra, Professor at UCD says:
“There’s a widespread idea that when Irish immigrants go out in the world and become successful, they remain fundamentally connected to home and what it is to be Irish. The Irish Mammy is a reminder that home will always be still available to you. At a time when everyone is encouraged to be entrepreneurial and changeable, she is an image of stasis and constancy. When there has been a widespread feeling of precariousness that so many have, the Irish Mammy personifies stability.”