Differences (rep Ireland) Irish V UK

I remember going to visit my grandma and my great aunt, both, when they were laid out in the funeral
home. This would have been the 90s, very small town, rural English county. I think that’s less common now in England at any rate, but it was the norm where they lived and I didn’t question it. ( Was a teen)
I do generally prefer a traditional church funeral to the “celebration of life” stuff that seems to be popular now. I think having that format to follow, and the vicar taking the lead, it’s comforting- you can sort of sit back and you know the drill.

Rip.ie is wonderful. We check it in work and I know our solicitor checks it in case he has a will that a family is unaware of.
My dils family is a pres family. Dhs cousin married into a Christians family. The cousin may as well have signed a prenuptial that any sons would be educated in Christians. My son in law teaches in a south Dublin fee paying school and loves it! All my kids and partners went through community schools.

Yes, I think the psychology of the speed of funerals is quite interesting. While I think it can be awful to be in extended limbo between a death and a funeral (eg I’ve known people to go on holiday before their parents were buried because it was already booked and the funeral wasn’t for another month or so, which I find completely bizarre); I also can’t imagine having the funeral all done and dusted within a couple of days when you’re still thunderstruck by the idea that a death has happened at all, particularly if it’s sudden. I think I’d have emotional whiplash from that!

Oh my gawd, the debs and the awful frocks. I can’t imagine the pressure on young girls to go all ‘25 year old’ princessy like they do, and it makes me extremely angry on their behalf.
Such a loathsome, regressive tradition. I hope there’s resistance to it in some schools, or girls are going to be dragging this grim ideal of womanhood with them for another generation.

I think the exhaustion and peopled-outness is psychologically helpful. I’ve certainly found it so, and the sheer outpouring of goodwill, people coming quite long distances from home to attend etc. But I assume it’s also a matter of cultural horses for courses, and that if you were expecting a three week period between the death and the funeral because that was your cultural norm, you might find the typical timeline in Ireland too rushed for you.

And funerals seem to need more arrangement in England, at least (I’ve never attended any in Wales or Scotland). In Ireland, you don’t need to invite anyone, or to ring around checking people know times.

My parents moved back to Ireland once they retired and so they both died and are buried there and in both their cases it was very quick. In fact the Parish priest wanted to bury my father the next day and I said that was too quick but he was buried the day after that. I think both my parents funerals were organised by relations as my son was only young and I don't remember doing any of the organising at all so I can't say I know how it's managed so quickly!
You do have a choice as to whether you keep the body at home for viewing or have it at the undertaker's, which is what I did as I thought it might upset a small child having a dead body in the house overnight. The night before having sit with my parents bodies whilst everyone who ever had any link to them whatsoever came to shake hands with not just me, but aunts, uncles and cousins, was quite draining TBH and I was so relieved when it was over.
I felt I was in a daze during both my parents deaths and funerals and not really taking it in, but now I think that way death is dealt with in Ireland is more positive- it is fully accepted as a part of life and much less feared I think.
I'm relieved I didn't have to spend days or weeks planning funerals when I was a single mother of a very active small child who hardly slept and I was chronically sleep deprived anyway!

I think that’s died off, or is at least well on the way to dying off. Of friends I have whose brothers all went to Christians, none of the Cork-based ones have sent their sons there. And my sense of DS’s classmates is that only a minority had fathers who went there, and that lots of them are there because their parents are commuting into that part of Cork daily for work, and it made sense to educate the children in the city as well, rather than try to get them to a rural/small town school in the opposite direction or rely on a school bus.

Some older men are still ridiculously old school tie about it all, mind you. I was at an event just after Cillian Murphy’s Oscar win, and you’d swear he’d done it for Pres, and to spite Christians. I was trying to keep a straight face.

A lot of the fee paying schools in Cork are a family thing...a pres family or a Christians family. And a Bandon grammar family was big where we live.
Re funerals...I am horrified at the idea of schools not allowing time off for a family wedding or funeral. In Ireland nobody would ask.

I don’t think that’s unusual, though. My grandfather died at around 2 am on Tuesday, the rosary at the funeral home was Tuesday night, the removal Wednesday evening p, and the funeral and burial Thursday morning. This was just before RIP.ie, but it had the usual announcement ents in the paper, local radio etc, and was a fairly big affair. I was seeing ham sandwiches every time I closed my eyes for days.

Yes, that is also true! I much prefer dealing with beaurocracy here than the UK.

But that attitude will also sometimes get you around bureaucratic problems in ways that in my experience happen less in the UK.

We moved back to Ireland just before Covid, and in 2021 I was trying to get my UK-born son a PPSN with a huge backlog. I ended up talking to an incredibly nice woman on the phone and provably sounded wrung out and wobbly (a house purchase had fallen through and we’d spent a year in different temporary rentals, and DS had only had weeks at school before the first lockdown and hadn’t settled, and we couldn’t get child benefit without it), and while she said there was a minimum of a four-month backlog, in fact I got his PPSN in the post a few days later. I think she bumped him up the list because she felt sorry for me, because she’d been an immigrant herself.

Yes , in Ireland we don't have the spectacularly complicated class system one finds in England. It wrecked by head doing Stratification for a college course in England. Here it is masked by the fact that what should be the Ruling Class consists of people who are not considered Irish by themselves or the rest of us ; namely the old Protestant Ascendancy. No class maybe but plenty of petty snobbery. Class = Money here , rather like the USA. Put a beggar on horseback and he'll ride to the Devil , my granda would say. Having said all that , I live in a housing estate which is 50 / 50 council and private and it works fine. But then this is a one horse Town .

I lived in Scotland for 5 years and the people weren't as different as say, the south of England, but there is a sort of formality in UK society that doesn't exist in Ireland. It's hard to describe properly unless you've experienced it, but I think it's the result of the "ah sure it's grand" attitude that prevails in Ireland. There's good and bad effects of that in Ireland - bureaucracy and gov paperwork aren't as stringent but it's a total pain if you have a problem you need someone to solve and there's no urgency!

I grew up in the Midlands and then moved around England a lot for work; over the years, it's turned out that most of the friends I have been closest to turned out to members of the Irish Diaspora, even if it wasn't so recent as myself with 2 Irish parents. I'm not sure if having Irish blood is anything to do with it but I doubt it doesn't because there definitely is a cultural and ethnic divide, even if it's subtle! People who've lived long enough in both countries would know this!

When did I imply there was anything wrong with reporting benefit fraud? I said we don't do it. A pp explained it very well, that it is a hangover of when we were under British rule and were sticking it to the man.

It doesn't matter how you justify not reporting benefit fraud, it's still wrong. Sticking it to the man just means piss-takers get more money and taxpayers stump up.

I think that some Cork people do like the snob value of the fee paying schools, though there are lots of other reasons to choose them of course, as you’ve described.
Progression to 3rd level from the fee paying schools is on average higher, particularly for boys. I’m not sure how much that has to do with actual differences in teaching though. Probably not much at all imho.

The debs....my colleague's dd has just done leaving cert. I have spent a year listening to the dress. Thankfully the event was last week so only a few more discussions about who was at the house before the debs and what the other girls wore and drama of partners going off with other people...

Certainly not in my experience either. Not that homophobia has magically vanished, any more than it has anywhere else, but things like big GAA stars being out and proud, Leo Varadkar as a young, gay Taoiseach, and better education in schools have made a huge difference. My brother is gay and our parents (now in their eighties) and older relatives have always known his boyfriends were his boyfriends. He’s now married — everyone attended. My parents have always known my gay friends as gay. I’m an academic, and I certainly see fewer rural gay students coming in with issues to do with coming out to their parents, though they’re still negotiating the visibility of gay life on campus versus their home place in many cases.

This is so sad. Im in Derry as I said previously and while NI is considered to have the worst of both worlds in some respects, my company would give 5 for a parent, 3 for a grandparent/aunt/uncle etc. Even at that 5 days for a parent most workplaces would be totally unbothered if you went off on the sick then afterwards for a bit of extra time, it's expected, and your annual leave wouldn't really come into it. It was almost the same at the company I worked in the Republic.

YANBU.
I was born in England to Irish parents, lived here for most of my life but we went to Ireland every year to see my grandparents and relations.
I have just moved back to England after living in Ireland for nearly 2 decades and I can agree that the two countries and peoples are a lot more different than people may think.
The differences may seem subtle but they're very real. I've not long woken up though so I can't think of any specific examples except that although native Irish people are very friendly, it's very hard to make close friends in IME. However, my son was only 7 when we moved there and he has a core group of very good, rock-solid mates so I would say if you grow up there, you would make good friends. The fact he has the accent helps as well I'd say!

I know less than nothing about the relationship between social class and education in SoCo Dublin, but DS goes to one of the Cork fee-paying schools purely because it’s on the doorstep and the school his primary was a feeder for (ET) is miles away across the city, and the others we considered were an awkward, two-bus commute for him. It was worth the fees for the convenience.

The education is to my mind indistinguishable from any non-fee-paying school, and so are the kids. You certainly wouldn’t pick them out as any more middle-class than other secondaries’ intakes (and we’re not MC ourselves.) I think whatever historical ‘notions’ /Cork merchant prince baggage went with that school is long gone.

The one thing I notice is that a lot of DS’s friends aren’t from the city but have parents who work here, so it makes sense for everyone to car-share into the city in the morning, for the kids to do homework club/study room until the parents are leaving work.

Yes, the class thing is nuanced in Ireland. Without having really had an Industrial Revolution in what would become the ROI for obvious reasons, and with the long after-effects of the Penal Laws’ edicts against Catholics passing on land, owning property, having an education etc, plus a far more rurally-based population, there was a much smaller middle class until into the post-independence period. The main class distinctions were between big and small farmers (and landless labourers) for a long time, and of course the UC were (a) imported via colonisation and (b) largely burnt out during the war of independence/civil war (though with regional variations). And the Church was the main means of working your way up the class ranks and into social power for many years.

Do they live rurally? I can't imagine anyone i know referring to a gay couple as flatmates.

I do live rurally and this seems odd to me too. Unless perhaps the parents are quite elderly and religious. But it wouldn’t be usual to refer to gay partners as flatmates these days in my experience.

I live in south UK, Londoner by birth, and I too think the visitors remove shoes thing is rude.

Why would you be appalled at another family's funeral choices? Its like this thing about judging what is "better" or "healthier" way to deal with death and funerals generally.