Ian Ryan
A London Irish Story as told to Anna Johnston
“I grew up in Blackrock outside Cork city. I love it there, it’s the perfect sized city because it still has that sense of community to it! I never had any intentions of moving to London until my friends got to that age where they started to emigrate to different countries. Before moving, I was running a Facebook page called ‘Humans of the Sesh’ and with that we would do a few college freshers gigs which brought me over to Bristol and London for gigs. From that my friend convinced me to make the move over to London but it didn’t take much convincing as I was bored of my job in a call centre in Cork. I’ve been here for four and a half years now.
I had a weird early career path. I started studying marketing in CIT but never ended up finishing the course. I got a job as a manager in a call centre in Cork for a few years. While I was there, I also ran the Facebook page Humans of the Sesh which had over 600,000 followers. The experience from that got me a job in social media for a political campaign. I was a bit lost career wise when I first came over to London as I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. There are so many career routes you can go down in London in comparison to Cork because there are so many more companies based here.
When I moved over an Irish guy gave me a job in a PR agency for a year which later led me to working at a gaming PR agency for three years. I’m now in gaming fundraising for a children's hospital charity in London. I work with gamers on YouTube who host live stream gaming marathons to raise money for the hospital.
Moving over to London was a shock because I had never lived out of my family home before coming here. I was a pure mammy’s boy at the time and still am a bit! I first moved to a warehouse in Manor House with two of my friends and about thirty other people. It was a big change from living at home to a room in a warehouse with no windows and not even knowing how to cook properly. I only knew a couple of lads over here and it took a while for some of my friends from home to follow me over. Living in the warehouse with so many other people was a good way of making friends at the beginning and I’m still friends with a few of them today. It takes a while to get your head around London, just the sheer scale of it. I was so homesick when I first moved over that I went back to Cork around once a month which is mad to think about now. Slowly over time I’ve gone back less and less.
‘Shit London Guinness’ started from a thread I created on my own Twitter account with pictures of terrible pints of Guinness I was served over here. People were really getting into it, especially people at home in Ireland who would laugh at how terrible the pints were.
I like a weird niche Instagram account and I had experience with running pages before and with my following from other social media pages it was easy to use those to gain followers for Shit London Guinness. I never expected it to take off the way that it did! The page usually just had a steady growth of followers and then Jamie Dornan gave it a shout out on the Graham Norton Show and that sent the page off to another level. Now I have an online clothing store from it. I do think the page has improved the Guinness around London. I think pubs are scared to be named and shamed on the page.
Guinness has really taken off as a drink over in the UK and a lot more Guinness is sold over here in the last couple of years. It’s seen as a cool drink now rather than an auld fella drink like it used to be. A lot of pub owners have heard about Shit London Guinness and the fear of their pints being posted on the page keeps the pubs pouring better and better pints.
I do miss the way of Irish people when you’re over here though. It’s hard to describe what that is exactly but I suppose it’s the craic. I would like to move home at some point but when that is, it’s hard to say! Ideally, I’d love to see Ireland turn into a big socialist utopia before then, where everyone has a gaff, and a job with good workers' rights and everyone is equal but that’s just not the case. The government seems to be bending over backwards for big corporations and in doing so is ruining Irelands cities. The housing situation in Ireland is just madness at the moment so until that changes, I don’t think I could move home because there just would be nowhere to live.”
Check out Shit London Guinness on Instagram: @ShitLondonGuinness Twitter:@ShitLondonGuinn
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