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As always, I welcome guest posts here on the site, especially if covering things I missed.  Today, question writer, Presidential advisor, future TV star and, most importantly, member of the Irish quiz team, Paddy Duffy takes us through his experiences at last weekend’s Celtic Nations Quizzing event in Edinburgh.

In one form or other, I’ve been quizzing for about 18 years. I’ve done GAA table quizzes in pubs with a disconcerting amount of other 10 year olds, I’ve done gameshow-style events for youth work residentials, I’ve done inter-faculty competitions and I’ve written the odd question for television.

So when my old friends and collective quiz Obi-Wans (John Nolan, Mike and Michelle Coyne) started talking about going international, I was all over it like acetylsalicylic acid in H₂0.

So several months after essentially being a lone ranger at Hot 100 events, I thought the Celtic Nations in Edinburgh would be a good way to test myself against the great minds of the islands and flex the old world ranking in a team for the glory of the country.  You know, take that No. 32-in-the-world ranking out for a spin to see what it could do. It turns out though that this keen mind was less Sherlock Holmes and more Maxwell Smart. Hubris will always get you in the end. Hubris, and Barry off Eggheads.
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On Sunday night, at around 10.20pm, I lay down on the couch.  My intention was to watch Match of the Day 2, which was about to begin.  However, I never did manage to turn on the television.  Next thing I knew, it was 4.40am! Such was the effect of the fantastic weekend I had at the first Celtic Nations Quizzing Championships.

The Irish C Team, ready to quiz (l-r): Derek Cray, John O’Sullivan, Michelle Coyne and Ger Slattery.

It was fun.  It was friendly.  It was full of quizzing.  Here’s a run-down of Saturday’s timetable, for instance: 10am Irl v Sco; 11am Irl v Wal; 12.30pm Individual quiz; 3pm Social quiz; 5pm Wal v Sco; 7pm dinner; 8.30pm Social quizzing (buzzers!). No wonder I was bushwhacked by the end.

The Irish team was 14-strong.  We had teams in the A, B and C divisions.  Alas, I must now admit that we didn’t win a single match.

In the cold light of day though, I don’t think we’re that far off the pace.  True, our A team were hammered on both occasions they took on Scotland, the eventual winners.  However, Wales beat Scotland in one of their matches and we could have beaten Wales in BOTH of our matches against them.

It’s always the ones that got away that sting the most and, for me and the A team, those defeats against Wales were the cruellest things.  In both matches, decisions made in the last round of questions cost us.  In the first game, we were two points ahead and facing a set of questions called ‘Euro snacks’.  In the second half of these matches, questions are worth three points each.  We got the first and third ones right but we were stumped by the second: “Caponata is a tomato and aubergine dish, native to which Mediterranean island?”.  It sounded Italian so we were between Sicily and Sardinia, obviously.  We plumped for Sardinia.  Incorrect.  Our opponents, strangely, didn’t go for Sicily either but that is indeed where it is from.  So we were eight up, and they had to face three questions on the remaining category ‘Judith’.

Blow me over if they didn’t go and get three-out-of-three!  And they weren’t easy either, being about a character from the Biblical book of Judith, a renaissance sculptor and a piece of music by Thomas Tallis.  So, a one-point defeat (and admittedly 10 losing bonus points) were our only reward.

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