Colm O’Regan: ‘I’m tipping away at sorting my parents’ stuff into artefacts and rubbish’

Colm O’Regan is sorry he doesn’t have a garden shed for “tipping away” at stuff. The comedian and author grew up on a small farm in Dripsey in west Cork, where his father was often “out, like, tinkering” – building fences, picking stones, mending things. He would see a job that needed doing, then tip away at it in the grand stretch of a summer’s evening. Tipping away has an “elastic” meaning, he says, in that it can mean working steadily at something, often to just avoid being idle, but it can also be an Irish euphemism for being absolutely “up the walls”.

He likes the phrase so much it’s the name of his new book on Hiberno-English, his second in two years. It’s also what he’s been doing recently with the belongings of his late parents. “In a kind of full circle, I’m gently tipping away at sorting their letters and old bills and receipts and stuff into artefacts that are interesting and pure rubbish.”

His mother, who died in late 2024, was a teacher, and last year he was delighted to be able to return a 60-year-old copybook he found among her things to one of her former pupils, whom he tracked down through social media. In an age of ephemeral digital communication, he often pleads with people to hold on to their children’s copybooks.

One of the things O’Regan has taken from writing Tipping Away and its 2025 predecessor, Gallivanting with Words, is that it is never too soon to start preserving language. Even the fact that fewer Irish people grow up on a small farm now than in the 1980s – he was born in 1978 – has lent a greater impetus to his desire to record the kinds of words that were ingrained in him when he was five years old, but that he hasn’t used with other people since leaving home.

He adopts a narrator’s voice. “With tears in his eyes, Colm said, ‘I have no one to talk with about beastings.’”

By beastings – “not a good word” – he means the agricultural slang for colostrum, or the first milk from a cow, though Google AI prioritises the British military definition (harsh punishment or extreme training exercises), while Apple’s AI transcription of our interview hears it as “bee stings” and “beef things”. With AI yet to grasp Hiberno-English, maybe we will end up keeping our language away from its automated small-talk prompts, the way we used to keep it away from the English, he suggests.

Tipping Away, or what he jokingly calls “the second book in the Gallivanting Cinematic Universe”, includes a chapter on farms, bogs and “mart lingo”, another on what the decline in religiosity means for language, and another devoted to “fighting words” such as ructions, kerns (Gaelic warriors) and galloglass, which he loves. It comes from gall óglaigh, meaning foreign warriors, which he thinks sounds like a health and beauty product or an up-and-coming software company, not a word for mercenaries from the western highlands of Scotland.

His father, who died in 2015, kept an “inner circle” of books that included English As We Speak It in Ireland by Patrick Weston Joyce, which recorded expressions in circulation in 1910. “People seemed to delight in two things in Hiberno-English then: criticising women and people being perceived as eejits. So there was ‘she’d coort a haggard of sparrows’, as in she’d go with anyone.”

It’s not necessary to understand the exact context of phrases like these, he notes, to pick up on the general tone of sexist disapproval. “It’s like, f**k’s sake.”

I confess my fondness for the Dublin term “gurrier” (used, often lightheartedly, to describe young troublemakers) and wonder if it’s dying out. “The band Gurriers will keep it alive, just like there’s a band called The Latchikos that keeps my favourite word my father used alive,” he says. (Latchiko is a catch-all term for an untrustworthy person.)

Dose, meanwhile, is one useful Hiberno-insult I’ve adopted in conversation more recently, usually as a label for a vaguely annoying and massively over-exposed celebrity. “And it was a venereal disease in [James] Joyce’s writing, you know? It’s great. I love that. The other thing is that words will survive if they sound good. Like why has f**k survived for however long it is? It just sounds like frustration. You can mourn the decline of some words, but others were simply never going to make it. The ones that did well were good product.”

I ask about the Cork use of “septic” to identify someone suffering from high self-esteem. “Yeah, septic as a noun – he’s a septic. It just means that you love yourself.”

He’s not sure if the traditional mortal fear of being accused of being “up your own hole” is as strong in Ireland as it used to be, but he did see some graffiti near Smithfield that implied it definitely still lingers. “Somebody had written, ‘You need to love yourself.’ It was this really lovely sentiment. Then about two days later somebody had added, ‘You need to shove it up your hole.’ It was like we just couldn’t bear the idea of self-care.”

O’Regan also explores the meaning of county names in Tipping Away and his favourite, “in fairness”, is Dublin, which has two: Dubh Linn (black pool) and the adjacent settlement of Baile Átha Cliath (town of the ford of the hurdles), the hurdles being the wooden rails that were placed where the river was low enough to cross or, alternatively, the mythological bones of a slain monster.

He can’t remember being struck by any unfamiliar slices of Dublinese when he moved to the capital in 2000 – after graduating from University College Cork with a degree in civil engineering – but he does associate that era with suddenly hearing a wider variety of accents on television and radio and the start of what he loosely terms the “culchie revival”.

He mentions the Irish propensity for filler words such as “ara” and “yerra” to mean “ah, sure” or perhaps nothing much at all. When he started doing comedy pieces for BBC Radio, he became “acutely conscious” of the way he would pepper his speech with ums and ahs rather than slide into a second of silence.

Hiberno-English, as a subject, is “sort of grist to a general mill” he has. “In comedy, you see the difference that swapping one word in for another makes to a joke,” he says. The order of words is also crucial in both stand-up and written humour. “Some comedy is the gap between what the person is expecting to hear and what they actually hear, and then that surprise hopefully makes them laugh.”

[ Throwing shapes: Frank McNally on the mysteries of the Hiberno-English ‘gimp’Opens in new window ]

This is his ninth book, and for his 10th he would like to write something in the same vein about maths. He used to have a “labour of love” maths and numbers podcast called The Function Room. “I would love to write a funny, interesting book that you could give to a transition-year student and go, ‘This is not going to come up in the exam, this has no use to you, but here’s why you learn some of the stuff you do,’” he says.

“We shut off difficult, complicated topics from people, because we don’t think they’ll get it. They will, if you put it the right way.”

He would also like to start a podcast on language. “I’m going to start tentatively doing videos. I have to get over myself and get the stuff out,” he says. He sees his 11-year-old daughter Ruby making videos with her friends – it might be a lip-sync video with cutaways and interesting angles – in half an hour, but it takes him that long to figure out how to introduce himself.

O’Regan (48) lives in Inchicore in Dublin 8 with his wife, Marie Dunne, a librarian, and their two daughters: Ruby and nine-year-old Lily. Parenting gives him a window into how words can abruptly fall in and out of favour, he says.

“When my children are looking for something on the internet, they don’t say Google, they say ‘search it up’. And it seems like a very mundane difference, but that represents the fact that Google no longer means anything to them and they’re searching within an app. It’s a tiny little tweak of language, but hidden behind it is the entire philosophy of how the internet has gone in the last 20 years.”

His also loves hearing his daughters use Korean words when they sing along to the girl group Katseye, who incorporate the language into their lyrics. The first song he remembers singing along to himself was Karma Chameleon by Culture Club. “And I didn’t hear it properly, so I was singing, like, Come a Comedian. Come, come, come, come, come a comedian.”

O’Regan runs the Inn Jokes comedy club at The Patriots Inn in Kilmainham, where in 2024 he also started hosting Innfant Jokes, or relaxed morning comedy events for people with babies. The “baby gigs” have since expanded beyond their original venue, prompting him to discard the Innfant pun and rename them as Little Laughs.

“It’s a different type of gig, because you can’t be roaring ‘hey, everybody’ into the microphone and get huge applause. People can’t applaud if they’re holding a child. I tell any comedian who does it that if their joke works at this, it’s a really good joke, and if people don’t get it, don’t worry. They’re distracted, they’ve had four hours’ sleep.”

His main advice to the comedians who sign up for Little Laughs is not to stand on a baby on their way to the microphone. He did one event in Clonsilla earlier this month where the babies climbed on to the stage. “It was a bit like Father Ted – the Bishop Brennan episode with the rabbits. There were all these babies crawling around me.”

We talk a little about his weekly column for the Irish Examiner (now on Saturdays), his love of how language sometimes evolves from mistakes and misheard words, and his defence of the Irish language’s “mysterious spelling changes” (thanks to the tuiseal ginideach, or genitive case), then I switch off my recording, wish him luck with Tipping Away and self-consciously deploy a classic slice of Hiberno-English to say goodbye.

“I’ll let you go.”

Tipping Away by Colm O’Regan will be published by Gill Books on October 29th