‘You can’t have a GAA kit and not have GAA trading cards’: Ahmed, With Love and the rise of Irish artist merch

Ireland Music Week takes place next month, with gigs and events that will highlight some of the recent success stories in independent music. A very visible one is the growth in and creativity of artist merchandise.
Globally, artist merch is a multibillion-dollar industry. It took off in particular during lockdown when, unable to attend gigs, fans looked to connect with and support artists in other ways. While wealthy stars produce expensive limited-edition T-shirts and the like that merely amount to an additional revenue stream, merch sales are now an important source of income for independent artists.
A recent attention-grabbing piece of merch was a full GAA kit by the artist Ahmed, With Love. The Dublin rapper, who is wearing scrubs when we speak – “I work in a pharmacy,” he explains – views his merch not just as an extension of his music but as a form of creativity in itself.
“I always want whatever my heart is into – music or anything – to be a good representation of who I am as a person,” he says. “I want my own personality in it. I want somebody to look at a piece of my merch and go, ‘Oh, of course Ahmed, With Love would do that.’”
He says the GAA kit, which is emblazoned with his name in Irish – Ahmed, Le Grá – was a version of “committing to a joke. When I think, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny to do such and such?’ then I have to do it: commit to the bit, see it through. I made some GAA cards, too. I mean, you can’t have a GAA kit and not have GAA trading cards.”
Ahmed, With Love featured on one of the standout tracks – Wok to Blackrock – on the Curtisy album What Was the Question. Now he’s about to release his debut project, the mixtape Comma, FullStop. That’s on October 11th. Eight days earlier he’ll play the Button Factory, in Temple Bar, as part of Ireland Music Week.
“I just like being true to myself,” he says of his creative decisions. “When I like something it’s, like, how do I make someone else like it as well?”
In some ways this new wave of coveted Irish artist merch began with Soft Boy Records’ T-shirt releases. Its now iconic Soft ice-cream T-shirt was a cult hit. Last winter the label collaborated with the Dublin streetwear brand Emporium. Kojaque, who cofounded Soft Boy, also recreated the F*** Schillaci T-shirt made famous by Colm Meaney’s character in The Van, swapping out the Italian footballer’s name for his own.
Funnily enough, one of The Scratch’s T-shirts is emblazoned with Requisite Celtic Soul, a reference to Meaney’s character in the film Intermission.
Spearheaded by Mary Nally, the Drop Everything festival’s collaboration with the Berlin designers Starstyling led to sweatshirts shimmering with an image of Inis Oírr, the island where the event takes place. Dreamtime, a Drop Everything merch line from the pandemic, focused on loungewear, and on the inner journeys many were experiencing during that era, with pillowcases, eye masks, incense and more.
The artist Classquatch created a set of tarot cards to represent each track on the Lethal Dialect album Songs of a Dead Dreamer. For her album Smiling Like an Idiot, Sorcha Richardson released a colouring book of illustrations. Another top-tier piece of merch is Gemma Dunleavy’s Up De Flats football jersey, a collaboration with Bodibro and the designer Zoë Redmond, who also designed a line of Lankum merch.
Other standouts include Orla Gartland’s Freckle Season cap and carabiner, CMAT’s I Make Country Music Without the ‘O’ silk scarf, and Øxn’s perfectly minimalist long-sleeve T-shirts. More recently, Fontaines DC released a set of beer mats to accompany their new album, Romance. Ispíní na hÉireann’s You Wouldn’t Steal a Six Counties T-shirt riffs on the never-ending meme appropriating the DVD-era anti-piracy public-service announcement.
One almost ubiquitous item of merch among music fans in Ireland is the Other Voices scarf. Molly King, the festival’s head of development, says its hugely popular annual scarf drop began in part because of “hordes of people descending on Dingle in voluminous scarves every year. I remember a barman saying that there was a joke among locals – ‘Oh, the scarves have arrived!’”
Other Voice was already getting into merch, “but there was definitely tote-bag fatigue. Mary Nally is due credit for finding the right scarf. She works with us, consulting on the aesthetic aspects and redesigns of Other Voices. She had found an amazing scarf supplier in Germany. My criticism of merch scarves I had seen at the time was that they were too short. They would tie around your neck once. They had the style of a football scarf but weren’t substantial enough. The scarves we have are superlong.”
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The scarves are designed by Sarah Moloney. “We just locked off our one for this year,” King says. “They’re really good quality. People are conscious of buying something that’s going to last. There’s something inherently wasteful in producing something that’s not of a higher quality. It’s not a good outlook to have. And with Irish fans, their standards are very high with what they expect from merch.”
Merchy Christmas, the annual artist market, is also “such a big thing”, according to King. “Conor Cusack, who started it, has done such an amazing job. You can support bands directly at a time when they need your money, and buy all your Christmas presents … Ultimately, merch isn’t just a fun thing for artists. It’s a vital revenue stream. It’s a financial lifeline for these artists.”
For more information on Ireland Music Week, go to irelandmusicweek.com. To buy the Ahmed, With Love GAA kit, go to ahmedwithmerch.com