Ah, it’s a beautiful day for a stroll down by the stream. My, what’s that bubbling near the bank? Oh no! It’s Jenny Greenweek, hiding in the reeds! Careful now—if she snatches you from the bank she’ll strip the flesh from your bones, and it will be your own fault. Well now, Jenny, what do you have to say for yourself?
Did you know …
The famed “luck of the Irish” is a real, measurable thing? It’s true!
We’re all familiar with lucky charms, and Lucky Charms cereal, and the supposedly lucky animated child who won’t stop trying to sell the cereal to us, but it turns out that the hearts, stars, horseshoes, balloons, rabbits feet, enemies’ ears, baby teeth, and ritual scarification to which we have so long attributed “luck” probably have very little to do with influencing the odds of the various things that happen to us each day. Wow! What a sentence! Let’s break for a moment.
I’m not saying that you should stop wearing your mouse necklace, only that it’s probably not a particularly lucky object.
No, it appears that the luck of the Irish is much more ingrained than that. In the late 90s, luck experiments were something of a research fad (I guess the grant money was there, so scientists were all over it). Most of the research came to nothing, but several groups found some very interesting associations.
One research team, out of the University of Ottawa, put several dozen test subjects from various nations together in a test chamber, instructed them to strip naked (so none of them could hold or hide any lucky charms), and then dumped buckets of ½” ball bearings on them from holes in the ceiling. While every single subject was injured, the researchers found that the Irish participants fared slightly better overall.
Another study, from the University of Minnesota, started with a similar international subject group and, again, stripped them naked, but this time each participant was given a lucky charm. All of the charms were the front right paws of 1-year-old male albino rabbits, so presumably each would be more or less as lucky as the others (they were randomly distributed to the subjects as well). The subjects, holding their rabbits feet, were then instructed to run across the frozen Mississippi River. The study was held in early March, however, and making any progress across the rapidly breaking ice would require quite a bit of luck. Of course, none of the participants made it entirely across the river before falling under the ice, but the Irish subjects consistently made it farther than those from any other nation.
Several other studies involved various anti-luck devices (black cats, broken mirrors, ladders, etc.), but peer review found these to be so plagued with faulty control and subject selection (there was an astonishing number of convicted arsonists and animal abusers among the participants) that we probably shouldn’t draw anything from the high rate of “spontaneous” cat combustion observed by the researchers.
We can be relatively certain, then, that the Irish are more lucky than the general human population, although the precise mechanisms are still unknown. But whether it’s something in the diet, a genetic quirk, or something else entirely, it’s probably a good idea to have an Irishman with you when you’re up against stiff odds (organ transplant surgery, for example).
