Pat Ingoldsby

Wax figure in the National Wax Museum of Ireland.
Born	1942 Dublin, Irish
Occupation	TV host, columnist, poet
Language	English, Irish
Nationality	Irish
Period	1977–
Relatives	Maeve Ingoldsby (cousin)
Website
www.jamesellis.eu/patingoldsby/page3.html

Pat Ingoldsby (born 1942) is an Irish poet and TV presenter. He has hosted children's TV shows, written plays for the stage and for radio, published books of short stories, and been a newspaper columnist. Since the mid-1990s, he has withdrawn from the mass media, and is most widely known for his collections of poetry, and his selling of them on the streets of Dublin (usually on Westmoreland Street or College Green).

In the 1980s, Pat hosted RTÉ children's TV shows named Pat's Hat, Pat's Chat, and Pat's Pals. His plays include Bats or Booze or Both (Dublin, Project Arts Centre, 1977); Hisself (Dublin, Peacock Theatre, 1978); Rhymin' Simon (Peacock Theatre, 1978); When Am I Getting' Me Clothes (Peacock Theatre, 1978); Yeukface the Yeuk and the Spotty Grousler (Peacock, 1982); and The Full Shilling (Dublin, Gaeity Theatre, 1986).

In the early 1990s, he had a column in the Evening Press (a now-defunct national Irish newspaper). These columns were later collected in The Peculiar Sensation of Being Irish.

Ingoldsby is a fluent Irish speaker and includes a few poems written in Irish in each book of poetry.

He lives in Clontarf, in Dublin, Ireland. Since sometime in the mid-1990s, he has withdrawn from TV, radio and theatre, instead devoting his efforts to poetry. Pat is still part of Ireland's arts scene, sometimes opening Art exhibitions, introducing then-new musicians such as David Gray, or launching other people's books.

He self-publishes through Willow Publications, which he set up and named after one of his pet cats (who later died).

Some of his books since 1998 have carried a note that they are protected by the "Bratislava Accord 1993, section 2 cre/009 manifest-minsk", the terms of which allegedly protect his book's content from being included in:

Most of Pat's poems are about his personal experiences, observations of life in Dublin, or mildly surreal humorous possibilities.

Topics of personal experiences vary from the death of his father, or the electroconvulsive therapy he received (c. 1988), to his appreciation of the natural world or his pets (mostly cats, but also some fish).