The class system in Ireland is a little more complicated

It is said the class system in England is based on birth, the class system in America is based on wealth and in Ireland there is a class system, but nobody can tell you what it’s based on. Is actor Barry Keoghan working class? He was born in the north inner city, his mum was an addict and died young, and he spent some of his early life in foster care. He was first given meaty roles by maverick Dublin filmmaker Mark O’Connor in the gritty urban low-budget films Between the Canals and Stalker.

He went on to feature in the RTÉ TV hit Love/Hate,

where a certain cat-murdering scene propelled him on to the lips of the TV chatterati.

Last month, he was handsomely suited and booted in an issue of Vanity Fair, the Hollywood issue, where he featured alongside many of the beautiful people nominated for Oscars.

He also appeared in a cheeky YouTube advertisement for the issue, capering about without a stitch on him.

He is big-time now, with arty roles in the likes of The Killing of a Sacred Deer, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, as well as blockbuster roles such as The Joker in The Batman.

So is he still working class? Can you be working class and swan around swanky Hollywood red carpets and have lucrative acting contracts? Well director Emerald Fennell thought so, as she cast him in the recent sleeper hit movie Saltburn, where crucial to the story is the fact that Keoghan’s character, Oliver, is convincing as a “bit of rough” when he is invited to stay in the stately home Saltburn by his super-posh aristocratic friend, Felix (Jacob Elordi).

When Keoghan accepted the Best Supporting Actor Bafta for The Banshees of Inisherin last year, he part-dedicated his award to “the kids from the area that I came from that are dreaming to be someone”.

Are filmmakers Kirsten and Naomi Sheridan working class? Their father, filmmaker Jim Sheridan, and uncle, playwright Peter Sheridan, were pure working class when they first stormed the Project Arts Centre in the 1970s. But the sisters were teenagers during the period their father made it into the big time, his film My Left Foot winning two acting Oscars for Daniel Day-Lewis and Brenda Fricker in 1990.

So are the Sheridan sisters working class? Can “working class” be inherited, like wealth?

Well maybe, but nobody knows.

Because we don’t know what working class is. My mother’s family (maiden name O’Brien) became homeless when her father lost his job, and the family was evicted on to the street with their furniture.

They were temporarily taken in by a local rich Protestant lady, until eventually my mother and her siblings were scattered among relatives across Munster. But they didn’t consider themselves working class.

They insisted they were in fact aristocracy, directly descended from Brian Boru, having been toppled from greatness by the Brits.

This idea continued on into my generation. Growing up in a household dependent on an income from the arts (my father worked in the Irish film industry when such a thing barely existed), we were definitely not working class, we were just poor. Also deluded.

In the first house I owned, a little terraced house in Dublin 6, the man next door, Jack, was a retired bus driver with a rich Dublin accent.

He was in his late 80s and he and his wife had reared a large family in the snug house. One of his daughters lived in a bigger house nearby, and was a schoolteacher.

Middle class, maybe?

Her daughter, who used to visit her grandparents a lot, was attending university studying law. On her way to upper middle-class, perhaps?

Jack had been a meticulous carer to his wife when she was hit by a stroke, and was one of the most graceful men I have ever met.

Because he was approaching 90, he used to tell me that when he planted the bulbs in the garden in the autumn, he always wondered whether he would live to see them come up in the spring. I think of him every year around now, when the bulbs are in flower.

This bus driver was working class maybe, but also in a class of his own.

‘Growing up in a household dependent on an income from the arts (my father worked in the Irish film industry when such a thing barely existed), we were definitely not working class, we were just poor. Also deluded’