23 February 2006
At what point in time did the chicken fillet roll replace the breakfast roll as Ireland’s favourite meat-based deli-counter sandwich? Maybe this is something else we can pin on the late-’00s collapse of the Irish economy. Breakfast Roll Man, as immortalised in David McWilliams’ pop economics primer The Pope’s Children, stood for the mobile army of builders, labourers and tradesfolk who found plentiful employment on the frontline of that decade’s credit-fuelled property boom. (A time when Ireland was building homes at an industrial rate seems like a different world now.) The Celtic Tiger went to work on a breakfast roll. Come the crash, the troika and the bailout, perhaps its association with prelapsarian prosperity turned that hot sandwich to guilty ash in the mouth. Or maybe we all started caring about our cholesterol.
‘Jumbo Breakfast Roll’ was the biggest-selling single in Ireland in 2006. This had less to do with any McWilliams-style economic commentary or national self-awareness, and more with the ’00s prevalence of novelty records and banter in our pop culture. Ten years after Richie Kavanagh topped our charts, ‘Jumbo Breakfast Roll’ is the Celtic Tiger ‘Aon Focal Eile’. Pat Shortt had also shot to fame in the ’90s, as one half of manic stage culchie comedy duo D’Unbelievables, and this record has that act’s same breakneck energy and wild-eyed characterisation, plus the same first principle that anything said loudly in a rural accent is inherently hilarious. Maybe this inadvertently reveals a social divide in Celtic Tiger Ireland: Breakfast Roll Man as the labouring class, the traditional economic migrant from the country to the city. It certainly doesn’t say much for the state of our pop charts.
So, I’m not a fan of ‘Jumbo Breakfast Roll’, although in 2006 I had pure notions; I was getting my breakfast every day from a local boulangerie in Paris, far from the claws of the Celtic Tiger. Not that croissants laden with butter are any better for your arteries than a fried pig in white bread. But that was the ’00s, in many ways an unhealthy time for us all.
