Krispy Kreme rage, Teresa Mannion, HomeToVote: The moments that made the Irish Internet truly great
If you’ve ever spent time poring over the details of the 1911 or 1926 census , or holed up in a library researching newspapers from a long-ago decade, you’ll appreciate the value of a physical archive. The past comes alive to us because of artefacts, writings and records maintained for future generations. The National Library of Ireland holds around 12 million items that document the life and culture of Irish society – books, manuscripts, newspapers, photographs, maps. But what about the artefacts that exist in relatively new spaces: online, in the cloud, in digital format? When journalist and writer Carl Kinsella discovered recently that a digital record of his own had been deleted, it was a bit of a wake-up call. Kinsella had worked for the website Joe.ie in the 2010s, writing social and political commentary and humour pieces and covering events like the dramatic arrival of the Irish public to the country’s first Krispy Kreme doughnut drive-through: “We have so much pent-up rage and frustration and hunger that it behoves us to converge upon our first 24-hour doughnut drive-through and slam the shit out of our horns until they feed us tasty, soft, sugary, doughy doughnuts into our grateful mouths.” Kinsella’s Krispy Kreme quotes live on only in a Guardian article about the doughnut hysterics, with the original Joe.ie piece cast to the digital wind. He’s practical about the deletion, saying, “I always had a feeling something like this would happen, and I think there’s a degree to which we’ve all trusted platforms – whether it’s a small online media organisation or a social media platform – to serve as archives for our work or our photographs or our personal memories”. And Kinsella’s right. There’s a precariousness and impermanence to what exists online. Even though resources like the Wayback Machine – which trawls the web taking snapshots of pages – can resurrect material from defunct websites, there is no guarantee that any or all content will be saved. Already so much digital history has been lost. “Any platform could go bust tomorrow and rob us of online artefacts whose security we’ve taken for granted. It underscores the need for all of us to find ways to be our own archivists for the things that matter to us,” Kinsella says. The National Library of Ireland does have a “Born Digital” archive among its collection. In 2023 it published its first digital preservation policy to recognise the importance of materials that represent the online life of Ireland, although the library acknowledges that the exponential growth of the volume of content continues to provide a challenge. Among the Born Digital artefacts are websites relating to the Repeal movement, the archive of the Yes Equality campaign and digital materials donated by author Marian Keyes . Journalist and entrepreneur Mark Little recently published a book called The Last Good Day on the Internet – the title derived from the viral photograph in 2015 that got people all over the world debating the colour of a dress. It was a time before toxic algorithms and AI slop, when the world wide web felt like a community. Mark Little on his new book ‘The Last Good Day on the Internet’ All this got us thinking: if we were to build an ideal Museum of the Irish Internet – the viral moments we’d like to preserve if the vast online archive were to vanish tomorrow – what else should be on its intangible shelves? The Best of Irish Twitter #YokeGate When Ireland briefly legalised class A drugs thanks to a legal loophole, the #YokeGate hashtag made the US late-night talkshows. DJ, cook and content creator Marcus O’Laoire posted: “Bought some of those legal yolks in Tesco earlier. Can’t wait to get scrambled.” Blindboy Boatclub called in to Tom Dunne’s Newstalk radio show claiming to have taken ecstasy. YokeGate was a banner day on what was, at the time, Twitter.com. Back then, unique slang, turns of phrase and cultural, political and historical in-jokes by Irish Twitter users and accounts like Not The RTÉ Guide and Motherfocloir provided rich and humorous commentary on life in Ireland. The site hasn’t been the same since Elon Musk took over and renamed it X . The golden days of Irish Twitter are firmly in the past. Super Mario in the red beret “Props to anyone who tries to be fashionable in Ireland. I wore a red beret once in Waterford and someone called me Super Mario,” tweeted @janky_jane in 2021, highlighting how difficult it is for anyone to get away with anything in this country. The tweet encouraged others to share sartorial traumas of their own, including one person who had returned home to her rural village and, while queuing in the chipper, was told: “You think you’re so great, coming back here, in your HAT” (@awedandflawed). Another tweet in 2019 by @Ciara87C told a similar story: “One day I was wearing a dress and knee boots, in Armagh, and someone shouted across the street to me “Someone thinks they’re in Hollyoaks”.” Séamas O’Reilly and the President Author and Irish Times columnist Séamas O’Reilly went viral in 2018 when he used Twitter to tell a story about the time he was 18 and accidentally ended up in a room with his boss and then president of Ireland Mary McAleese , while high and “sweating like microwaved bread”. The story has since been turned into an animated short film featuring Chris O’Dowd and Aisling Bea . Viral TV moments Pat Kenny and Mattress Mick Do you remember where you were when Pat Kenny referred to Ireland’s celebrity mattress tycoon Mattress Mick as simply “Mattress” on live television? It was 2019, and Kenny was hosting a debate on Pat Kenny Live on Virgin Media One. Pat introduced the bed magnate as “Mattress Mick” but then moved to the more familiar “Mattress”, before stuttering and adding “ ... eh Mick”. The online reaction to the show is vital to our nation’s digital history. And we couldn’t mention viral TV without acknowledging how we as a people embraced the liveblogging and livetweeting of #RoseOfTralee and #LateLateToyShow, triggering global confusion when both hashtags trended worldwide year after year. Normal People Normal People first aired on RTÉ in the midst of the pandemic, causing a stir across the internet and on the airwaves. Liveline played host to a debate about the sex scenes in Element Pictures’ adaptation of the Sally Rooney novel, and poor old Joe Duffy was driven to tweet “I’m calling in sick. Who do I ring?”. Normal People star Paul Mescal also used Twitter to simply declare “I’m Irish” after the British press was suddenly desperate to claim him. In fact, any Irish digital archive should include a comprehensive record of the many times Britain has tried to claim an Irish high achiever as their own. Daisy Edgar-Jones: ‘It was great practice for Sense and Sensibility, all that time in Fermanagh fields with cows’ Don’t make unnecessary journeys In 2015, RTÉ broadcaster Teresa Mannion became a global viral sensation when her outdoor reporting during Storm Desmond turned “don’t make unnecessary journeys” into a mantra for anyone taking on inclement weather. Mannion became an internet meme; her enthusiastic warnings were remixed into a dance tune, and her image was edited with clips from disaster films like The Day After Tomorrow. More recently, her famous quote went viral on TikTok. We wouldn’t be Irish if we weren’t obsessing over the weather and its effect on road conditions, school closures and supplies. More than once, the availability of bread and accusations of hoarding Brennans have taken over our online spaces. And who can forget when empty supermarket shelves turned into all-out looting in 2018, when a JCB was used to break into a Lidl in Tallaght? Coming together in grief Irish mourning has moved with the times, from death notices broadcast on local radio to livestreaming funerals during Covid and beyond. The deaths of public figures like Manchán Magan in 2025 and Sinéad O’Connor in 2023 precipitated outpourings of respect and grief on social media platforms, with people sharing clips and tributes and personal reflections on what their work meant to them. Our greatest innovation, though, has to be RIP.ie , a website that not only serves the Irish need for community (and nosiness), but also allows for the collection of memories and tributes through online books of condolence. #HomeToVote The internet has always been a great mobiliser for both public and private causes. #HomeToVote was a rallying call during the 2015 marriage equality campaign and ballot, and again in 2018 for the referendum to repeal the Eighth Amendment. Arguably as important was #HomeToRide, a hashtag started in 2015 by Twitter user Linda Kavanagh, which collected stories about prodigal Brendans and Siobháns coming back from Vancouver or Perth or Rathmines for Christmas to congregate in the local pub on St Stephen’s night. Miscellaneous museum aisles Viral Irish journalism When Irish Times journalist Patrick Freyne wrote about Oprah’s infamous interview with Harry and Meghan, his opening paragraph, which regularly goes viral, read: “Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.” In 2017, Amy O’Connor published the findings of a canvass of every TD in Ireland and their views on Beyoncé on DailyEdge.ie, the now-defunct pop culture wing of The Journal. Her vital work, which must be preserved for millennia, inspired articles in Vanity Fair, Teen Vogue and the Washington Post. Other viral classics We must make space in the Museum of Irish Internet for a wide and varied collection of other Irish viral moments online, including but not limited to: Comic Shane Dan Byrne’s Easter Sunday sketch , the 2025 Cherry Tomato Bridge fever dream , The Rubberbandits’ Horse Outside , the man who slipped on the ice ( who has his own Wikipedia page ), Clisare’s Shite Irish Girls Say , Senan Byrne’s helium balloons Vine , Catch Him Derry , my limes!, Carl Kinsella’s free Luas and many, many more. Early internet artefacts While our museum is largely a digital archive, it’s imperative to make room for some of the physical representations of how the internet came into Irish homes in the first place. Prepare a display case for the ESAT Telecom and Eircom promotional CD-ROMs which delivered dial up software to the huge grey family computers in the corners of sittingrooms around the country in the mid to late 1990s. We might as well include some of those computers too, to round out the collection.