According to a new poll – and don’t ask me where the poll was conducted, or what evil conglomerate commissioned it – the Irish moan for about 9.5 hours a week. Every week.

And I know this is where I’m supposed to howl in a funk so ineptly restrained that I give everyone in the first four rows an unexplained hernia, but I have to disappoint this time, I’m afraid. I have no problem with my countrymen indulging in a healthy whinge.  Not healthy because it’s cathartic, mind; that would imply that our complaining is at least partly deliberate, that moaning like a drunk man on rotten stilts in a gale is a conscious, almost pre-planned activity. And it’s not. The Irish moan as communication. Where other, less imaginative races may say, “hello”, we say, “Jaysus, the fucking traffic. Sure I’d have been faster had I ridden in on a fucking dead junkie”. It’s more personable, and it wastes more of the English language.

I thought I’d put together a short, print-out-and-keep guide to Irish cribbing for our less native readers (Protestants and that), because it’s the weekend and I’m feeling benevolent. Foreigners! Should you find yourself marooned on this boggy splodge, you may approach the rest of us with a long, long face, safe in the knowledge that you’ve swotted up on these common caterwaulings.

The Weather: It’s shit. The Irish know this. That we were at the end of the queue when climates were handed out, and they had nothing left, so they just hodged a load of leftover splatters together and said, “No, honest, it’s this lovely stable climate, good for growing dock leaves and singer-songwriters” … this is not something we’ve only realised with the advent of Ryanair and Lanzarote. Knowledge is not acceptance, though, which is why we cautiously venture, “Not a bad morning” when we don’t have to paddle to work. Complaining loudly about the weather is mandatory in that it lets others know you’re in control of your mental faculties, have noticed your surroundings, are empathic enough to know it’s a common problem, and can therefore be trusted with a Dail seat.

The Recession. The Irish are such natural complainers that we managed to start complaining about the Recession before the Recession began. When everyone was out there making love to Italian tourists on beds of paper money in the shadows of burning churches, we were still gasping across to one another, “Ah, sure the younger people won’t know what hit them when the bubble bursts. They’ve never had it bad. They won’t survive”. The Irish have great value in being poor, you see, and so feel justified in complaining about any sudden downturn in poverty. When I was a wee girl, my favourite ad was for the St. Vincent De Paul (think ye that I be joking? Fools!). We’re in our element now, of course, even more so because we Saw It Coming.

The Flu: Swine Flu is a new and ‘orrible horror, of course, and you can’t sneeze without being sheep-dipped by the HSE and their wipe-clean legions of hysterical fucktards. But well before this little piggy went to the ICU, we were giving out about being on death’s door with aches, pains, and lack of Lemsip. You could never meet a more spluttering bunch of eyesores than the Irish on a Monday morning; t’was like a biblical plague. No one ever had a cold in Ireland. We just got the flu, the neverending dithers and sniffles and flicking through gravestone catalogues.

The Roads: During the reign of the Celtic Tiger, he of the warm fur and great big dripping teeth, there was chance aplenty to fill in the chasms in our national roads. But without the chasms, what would we have been? Purposeful, perhaps. On time. Gliding to our destinations like fucking Germans. What would have become of the national past-time – driving monstrous lorries loaded with gravel over small county roads on the way to fill holes caused by monstrous lorries who had created them on other country roads on the way to fill up similarly-birthed crevasses in other country roads?

The Price of Drink: Because drink is expensive. Drink is dear, to our hearts and to our bank accounts. Drink is necessary; it lubricates complaining like nothing else, it facilitates and exaggerates and elevates the common Whinge into something of worth, something understood, something soggy with shared tears. And what, then, do They do? They raise the price of the pint! An extra ten cent a pop to transform a common-or-garden moan into a fucking art form the whole nation can get behind! What the fuck is with that, like?

The complaint will never die. The Irish love for a solid bout of grousing should never die, not when They keep putting the price of the pint up, another twist to the Mobius Strip of life, another string to the bow we keep aimed at our least-favourite foot.

Have a beautifully awful weekend, a chairde.