Simpsons show green credentials with Patrick's Day visit to Ireland

LOCK UP your donuts. The Simpsonsare coming to Ireland on St Patrick's Day in the first ever episode to be screened in Europe ahead of the US.

Expect half an hour of begorrahs, leprechauns battling over pots of gold and fat, drunk men in scanty emerald-green pants painting the town yellow when the hapless Homer drags his family across the pond for an Irish-set episode.

In the Name of the Grandfather sees Grampa Simpson reveal that he has always longed to return to the auld sod to sink a pint in O’Flanagan’s pub in Dunkilderry, where he claims to have spent the best night of his life. Homer, nagged into submission by Marge after forgetting to join his father in a three-legged race at the retirement home, decides to make Grampa’s dream come true.

In a wholly unpredictable twist of fate, Homer and Grampa get hideously drunk and end up buying the pub from landlord Tom O’Flanagan, who is played by Colm Meaney.

However, as with everything Homer touches, things don’t run smoothly. The town isn’t quite as overrun with comely maidens as Grampa remembers it.

Homer finds the smoking ban makes running the pub impossible, even for a man of his rare talents, and the business sinks like the Blarney stone in a vat of porter. Doh!

Elsewhere in the episode, the first ever to be screened in Europe ahead of the US in the show’s 20-year history, the family visit the Giant’s Causeway, Blarney Castle and the Guinness Brewery. Whether or not they wander aimlessly around Dublin looking for Kelly’s Book is unknown at the time of writing.

It’s not The Simpsons’ first brush with Ireland. In an earlier episode, Grampa proudly boasts of running the Irish out of Springfield in 1904.

Bart once got so roaring drunk during a St Patrick’s Day parade in Springfield that the city’s government enforced a 200-year-old prohibition law, prompting Homer to embark on an ill-fated career as a bootlegger. The parade featured a Drunken Irish Writers float, one of whom – the spitting image of James Joyce – jumps fists-first into a street brawl. U2 appeared in the 200th episode, in which a brogue-spouting Homer blags his way into their concert wearing a green vest and flat cap and hauling a sack of potatoes.

Bart also discovers that Springfield’s annual “Snake Whacking Day” was invented “as an excuse to beat up the Irish”.

The actress who voices Bart, Nancy Cartwright, will join executive producers Al Jean and James L Brooks for a special screening of In the Name of the Grandfather at the Lighthouse Cinema on March 16th before all three hop aboard a float in Dublin’s St Patrick’s Festival parade the following day. The episode will be broadcast on Sky 1 on March 17th at 7.30pm.