Ireland is gripped by catfish chaos

The catfish chaos demon striking fear into the hearts of amateur Irish athletes

What a time to be in Ireland: the nation has been rocked by scandal.

The young men of the Gaelic Athletic Association are being warned to watch themselves online. The ladies of Ireland are lamenting at a girl’s ability to break the hearts of (potentially) hundreds while they can’t even get a text back. Everyone is speaking in hushed tones. Have you heard the latest on the GAA catfish story?

@abigailparkinson_I haven’t the work ethic tbh #gaacatfish

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If you’re not in Ireland or the algorithm hasn’t decided you’re Irish-ish, you probably don’t know what I’m talking about. Essentially, a few years ago, two popular radio hosts, both named Johnny because this country only has nine names for men, shared a story about being catfished online. It was funny, a little ridiculous, makes you shake your head a wee bit—all the hallmarks of a good yarn. At the time, it was a popular topic, but recently, more news came to light and the duo revisited the topic for a part three, which has the country gone half mad with speculation and good ol’ social research.

I recommend giving it a listen, but if you don’t have three hours to dedicate to niche Irish gossip (what else could you possibly be doing with your life?), I’ll do my best to explain what’s happened and why I think this is such a uniquely Irish story despite catfishing being such common fodder around the world.

What’s the gist of the GAA Catfish story?

Once upon a time, a podcast host/sort-of television star who was feeling a bit tender after a big breakup followed a beautiful woman on instagram. She had about 15,000 followers, and they had a few people in common. One night, feeling a bit bold, he slid into her DMs and they ended up chatting for weeks. She managed to dodge many dates thanks to various illnesses and family members dying left, right, and centre, but her stories were always substantiated by her instagram stories.

Waiting in the wings, however, and lending legitimacy to ‘Cora,’ was always her best pal, Nikki. Eventually, after many hijinks and much sleuthing, it became apparent that ‘Cora’ was a catfishing alter ego used by Nikki, and the podcasters told her to stop her catfishy ways and leave them alone. (If you listen to the podcast, you’ll hear some of their recorded conversations.)

Surprise, surprise—Nikki didn’t stop. In fact, Johnny had also definitely not been the first guy she’d catfished. He wasn’t even her usual mark. Nikki was weaving a web of lies that seem to have caught a ton of county GAA players.

What is a county GAA player?

Imagine if your nation had a sport that was A-side locally, but B-side internationally. Think lacrosse. Now imagine people gave a shit about it. It’s an amateur league, so players tend to have jobs and lives outside of the sport, but they have a bit of recognition and sometimes a fan following. Ireland has Gaelic sports—hurling and football (which I guarantee is not like your football) and the guys have a particular look about them, not only because they all have one of two haircuts (sharp fade or Paul-Mescal-mullet) and wear short shorts (as God intended.)

What was she doing to these lads?

Nikki would essentially create webs of profiles—full interconnected friend groups to tag each other and give the illusion of community. She’d use the images of real friend groups based in another country so the real people would be less likely to see their images being used in this way, and because they were obviously gorgeous, she’d get these young men lining up dates. One guy figured he had been in a relationship with one of her personas for years.

She’d send scandalous selfies and share emotional stories. She’d also stalk them and take pictures of them around to post on other profiles to make it look like the ‘friends’ were in relationships with other GAA players. The lengths this girl went to were wild, and she obviously has some issues. She’s been at this since Facebook days, and apparently kicked off again recently, even after being outed by the Two Johnnies podcast a few years ago. The third part of their series is basically a PSA about catfishing, and a friend here told me that the GAA sent out an email to all players warning them about the dangers of catfishing.

To date, she hasn’t scammed any of them out of money, she hasn’t shared explicit photos of them online, or anything that has crossed the line into fraud. (Although more stories are coming out every day, so who knows.)

Every time she gets caught, she activates a network of fake accounts to harass the guy into leaving her alone. The story is wild and the stuff she comes up with is crazy. She’s dodged dates for:

• COVID

• Dead aunt

• Dead best friend

• Dead uncle

• Dead parents

• Dead grandparents

• Sudden illness

• Coma (my fave)

• Liver transplant

• Went to the grocery store and heard her parents had been in a car crash in Limerick so she had to leave town immediately and her phone obviously died

What makes this so Irish?

Catfishing isn’t new, nor is it restricted to Ireland, obviously. One of my favourite podcast episodes ever is one where a girl I know dives into her teenage catfishing out of boredom in Alberta in the early 2000s. The MTV show in the states is obviously also wild. But there are a few things that make this story feel so, so, so Irish to me.

I’ve come to realize that Ireland is a very wholesome country. As someone who read a lot of Kevin Barry, I was expecting a bit more in the way of snark, but typically, people here are very thoughtful and genuine. They don’t enter an interaction expecting to be scammed or defrauded. So when a beautiful woman slides into their DMs, there’s a combination of things happening.

These GAA players think ‘of course this is a real beautiful woman that wants to talk to me’ which I can’t help but appreciate and roll my eyes at. And when they bond over something in phone calls and voice notes, they are approaching these interactions very genuinely. Some of these guys considered themselves to be in relationships without ever having met the girl in real life. Which, wow, pretty privilege is real.

The other piece is discretion. None of these lads checked in with the mutual connections to say ‘oh, do you actually know this girl Cora? She says you’re dating her friend’ until after they were already heavily invested and starting to feel skeptical.

And once it was over, people were private about what had happened to them because there’s understandably a bit of embarrassment that comes with being taken for a ride and falling for a catfish. I imagine this discretion is how she managed to keep it up for so long. Because, as I mentioned, Nikki has a type, and that type is mainly limited to a small sports league on a small island nation. And somehow she’s managed to do this for at least a decade, and none of these boys have talked to each other about it until now.

Can you imagine if someone pulled this on fifty lacrosse players across Canada? The whisper network would work pretty quickly to prevent other guys from being taken for a ride.

Maybe it’s just the crew I roll with, but when the fellas in my (Canadian and Australian) life see a stunner on insta, match with a babe on Tinder, or receive a DM from a beautiful woman online, they immediately assume there’s the potential for something dodgy. Whether it’s a bot or a catfish, they tend to be pretty savvy about finding ways to verify that she’s a real person. It’s a sort of media literacy that I don’t think exists here, because it probably hasn’t needed to. They even mention in the podcast that catfishing isn’t just an American problem. (No shit.)

This combination of wholesomeness, keeping your business to yourself, and a lack of media literacy, alongside the GAA players incredible—and maybe a little misguided—confidence in their ability to score absolutely stunning women, has led to a nation being completely blindsided by this catfishing scandal.