‘All you hear is bloody Irish accents’: the unstoppable growth of Sydney’s ‘County’ Coogee

Irish hairdresser Luke McCaul near his apartment in Coogee. Photograph: Blake Sharp-Wiggins/The Guardian

“I remember having my mind blown seeing boys walking down the beach in Irish football jerseys,” says Luke McCaul, a Dublin-born hairdresser and drag queen who moved to the beachside Sydney suburb of Coogee to work 15 years ago.

“Like, ‘what the fuck are they doing?’ Gaelic football jerseys – in Australia!”