She was a right skanger. Five brats at home with their Moroccan father at the weekend, her out on the town and picking up men at the pub where her brother worked. Women in Ireland know skangy men when they see them, but the nice Irish guys keening for a bit of affection play right into the claws of the female skanger Cailleachs. You know them to see them, thin as rails, drunk as eejits, hair coloured unnaturally and pulled back so often that they have a grotesque alopecia around the ears that pulls back from skeletal, made-up faces. They are wire-mad grasping and desperate to be super mothers, while spending the weekends out of their heads drunk, and screwing any bloke that isn't nailed down; trying to go the complete opposite of the other 5 mornings they spend spit-cleaning children piling out the door in uniform skirts and too much Bratz makeup.

One of these was trying to tell me that the man I was dating, her brother, was slow, like Forrest Gump. She said, he’s a clown without dignity, working nearly for free, having spent his time in therapy clubs surrounded by Mongoloids and hand-clappers, unable to fend for himself, pissing his drawers, you name it. I was skeptical, that’s not what I heard; I was suspecting the motive was more than concern for me being with a retard. I knew he wasn’t a retard at all. To the tune of 600 Euro a week going into the family household, earned by him.

Well, I got the full story of what happened to him at the ages of 8 and 13; let's just say that I can see what he was born with, and without. He was born with an untouchable innocence, along with a normal intelligence; even though his mind moves faster than anyone else's, somehow he unlike almost all other human beings, does not have the demon door. When we are 17 years old, we are optimistic about the whole world and the future it has for us, when we feel it nearly overwhelms us, when we see life it is with discovery and pleasure. He has the mind of a 17 year old, she says. Good, I said. I've dated a load of miserable, skeptical plonkers who are so-called normal. I've had enough of being treated like crap.

The demon door seems to be within almost everyone. It's a door opened by evil, trauma, abuse, tragedy, loss, heartbreak; it instigates a pattern of self-defense which directly interferes with living a life in which love flows easily between ourselves and others. It's the doorway through which the demon enters and sets itself in the soul like an egg with a writhing larva in it; attached to the mind in all decisions like a little co-pilot at the helm of our choices. The easiest manifestation here makes someone pick up a drink and never put it down; the yearning for addiction to silence the yammering of family, faith, and obligation jumping down their necks.

The man in my life is completely immune to the demon door. He doesn't have one. He has literally been born without one. That is the only difference between him and other human beings. There are geniuses who are the same, and far denser idiots who can be possessed by rage. This constant level of being an optimistic, playful, intelligent 17-year-old is what keeps him where he is, although his body is getting older; his spirit has not become weary.

And here was this wreck of a skanger standing outside my door, bleary-eyed, sucking on a cigarette, bra hanging out of her hoorish gear, telling me that her brother was slow, not quite there.

Well you got me there, missus, I thought, he sounded completely sane, intelligent, and capable to me from day one. I saw the man working, I said to her. You try managing six-foot, 200-pound playschoolers all hopped up on sugar, usually Eurotrash or English on holiday who don't give a shit about the state of the place they're leaving, throwing inflatable women and beach balls around the inside of a historic pub. Then, you add junkies weaseling their way inside the side doors so they can throw their jacket over a handbag and make off with it; there are several of those each evening, add the gyppos who park outside the side doors keening for the poor condemned babies they're carting around, and make their way into the loo to steal women's handbags, mix it in with about 300 milling Americans looking pie-eyed in the streets of Temple Bar, possibly about to lose their passports and handbags to gypsies and junkies for the sin of being clueless.

Add your brother, I said, and he is constantly moving, nonstop; between making the Americans laugh and making the junkies livid, there is a reason why he is the most well loved character in Temple Bar and most hated; he is unafraid of criminals and willing to take risks that doormen won't. The Guards are constantly behind him because they know he will do what they legally can't: tell a gyppo or a spiker to feck off, you gyppo, or you junky waster.

She nearly spat out her frustration when I told her, as if her brother was being beaten up by junkies on a daily basis with him sitting passively like a moron unable to fend for himself. If anything, the situation was the opposite. I said, I wouldn't be paid what he's getting to babysit Temple Bar while the world goes mad around him, and stay cheerful the whole time. Whatever he does, it's super human.

She sat quiet for a while. She didn't know what to say. I've seen the man at work; he is literally a whirlwind for 12 hours. Then he comes home to kiss me and make me coffee. And not once has he acted like an idiot, not once have I lost patience with him, not once have I thought, he's a bit slow.

He is twice as fast as any so-called normal person at the age of 42, never seeing a drop of drink, pin-perfect suit, clean as a whistle, and you're there, woman, your spaghetti-strap zebra top has fallen down under your jacket with your badly matched pink bra visible for all to see; you're a stringy bundle of nerves, and I had to stop you trying to shag your date on my back porch at 4 AM because your meddling father asked you to check out your brother's American girlfriend.

You know why? He's a pensioner and my new boyfriend brings 600 Euro a week into that house, because dad manages his bank accounts, and I had a look at those statements; the balance should have been in the tens of thousands. It wasn't. ATM withdrawals in the hundreds, and my boyfriend doesn't have the ATM card for that account. Dad is calling in contractors on his house, on a pensioner's wage?

This is called family loyalty in Ireland: let them tell you all your life that nobody else cares, that family should stick together, and the one who believes it like a gentle, idealistic sucker gets the booby prize of supporting a packet of alcoholic wasters. And when you can't take the pressure and insult any more of thankless pricks taking your wages out of 'family loyalty', you fuck yourself into the Liffey and hope the Guards don't dive in after you.

I was mildly livid to say the least. Don't mind her, he says; do you really think if I listened to her, I would be anything? She was ordering him round in MY apartment, I thought, make me a cup of tea, go wash your feet they're manky (not all that bad really), get me this, you shouldn't do that. He just sat in his seat and looked at her. You're here for me da, he says, to let him know what kind of girl I'm with. You go ahead and tell him. (...You tell him she's sound and makes more bleedin money than you ever did, wit your 5 kids and Council House.)

Later, I said to him, she told me you were a retard. She said that that car accident at 13 didn't happen. ...She was a tot when that happened, and she's jealous of you, he said, I've 5 other brothers and sisters who work for a living who will tell you different. We'll be at me real sister's house tomorrow, he says, she works in computers and has a lovely husband, and she will give you all the story I haven't told you.

Don't bother wit her, he says. I agreed.

I never believed them anyway, he said. But when you're alone and nobody wants you, it's your family who takes up the slack. Yeah, I said, but it's always for a price, isn't it. They told you that they were doing you the favour, when in fact, it was always the other way round; but when our hearts are broken, that's when the little angry vampires within other human beings who were born with the demon door, see fit to suck us dry. And still he never had a demon door to open, and they see fit to torment him for it all his life in some form or another for the cheeky and indomitable sin of a clean soul and cheery demeanour.

They never just leave us alone; it's too easy to be happy, it's not polite to be happy. How dare we have clean souls when they made the loving effort to break us in two, to tear us in half, to inject us with hatred; and when we say, 'no', it becomes a barrage and cacophany of irate and insulted demons who scream to tell us how rude, bold and uppity we are not to let them in.

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I broke up with him two weeks later, but it wasn't his fault. I cannot even think about stepping into that demon door to deliver others from lives full of torment; it was his job to step into my happy life, not mine to deliver him from his. He is a good soul but I cannot carry his load. When you date someone in Ireland, you date their family. I have come face to face with too many sick women to make time for them; the last time it got me a warning from the PSNI in Northern Ireland for threatening bodily harm to a horrendous, screeching crow of a bleach-blond bitter bitch, but the man I was dating thanked me for it for years after when the whole debacle gave him a side to stand on. Maybe I will never understand Ireland, but I am getting it.

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