The Best Irish Ads...Ever!

Advertising is a part of life. Some ads are good enough to create shared memories. If you're old enough, watching old television ad breaks (people have uploaded quite a few of them to the internet) is a real trip down memory lane. ("A trip down memory lane" might be a cliché, but it's one of my favourites. Think of it as a "Proustian moment" instead, if it makes you feel better.)

Here are my favourite Irish TV ads from down the years. (Well, some of them are from the cinema and the internet.)

Tourism Ireland's 2011 advertisement for the then-new Terminal Two in Dublin Airport.

A rather naughty ad for the chocolate bar Moro. Yes, the humour is bawdy, but it's undeniably funny, and sharply observed in terms of how Dubliners spoke at this time.

A 2007 ad for the Irish Financial Services Regulatory Authority, which might have been better occupied trying to avert the 2008 banking crisis than making ads. "I don't know what a tracker mortgage is" became something of a catchphrase in Ireland. This is the sort of "everyday surreal" that I love so much. Believe it or not, a spin-off documentary was made twenty years later. Well, sort of.

No list of memorable Irish ads would be complete without this famous 1987 ESB ad, which features the Dusty Springfield song "Going Back". This seems to have lodged in everybody's memory. It certainly did in mine. I remember this ad making me very conscious of my mortality, for some reason. Emigration was a big theme of the period.

Speaking of emigration, this is a 1991 Scottish ad for Tennant's lager that was shown in Ireland, replacing the name "Caledonia" with the words "my land". It's a great piece of story-telling in little more than a minute.

Apparently it was pulled as SNP propaganda. I didn't know that until now!

This 1986 ad for Bórd na Mona (who sell peat briquettes), The Marino Waltz by the Dubliners, is in my view the single greatest Irish TV ad of all time. Such a simple concept, so brilliantly executed. Back when romantic Irishness was still allowed.

I can't resist including this Drifter ad from 1990, even though it was UK rather than Irish. I think I read somewhere that it was shown in Ireland for longer.

"Doctor, doctor, can I have a prescription?". This public health ad was shown on UTV (Ulster Television) in the 1980s, and the character has a strong Northern Irish accent. But, interestingly, the voice-over at the end sounds like a Dubliner.

I remember this one from the cinema rather than the TV, and it was effective on the big screen. I think it's from 2001, but I'm not sure.