Differences (rep Ireland) Irish V UK

I'm always astonished at how early people seen to get married in the US. Straight after college seems normal, would be seen as ridiculously young in Ireland

Actually, the education point reminds me of another difference- there are very few private schools in Ireland and it's not really considered by most families.

I'm Irish, living in England and would agree about regional differences. Southern English middle class culture feels very alien to me, whereas northern English people feel much more 'normal'.

All the reasons cited above I guess plus the fact that we have a pretty high rate of people with a 3rd level education so I guess it makes sense that well educated people with more career choices etc would spend time building that up before settling down, particularly women. One of my friends got married at 27 and we all thought it was wild 😂 It's not of course, but that was the perception.

Additionally a lot of Irish people tend to spend some of their youth after university living abroad in Australia. Canada, Middle East, UK etc and then come home to settle down.

I think the stars are first marriages from what I read.

Um there isn't a great deal of options around abortions - its not really a choice

No idea, but it's an average so would include second marriages too . Still quite late I think

The amount does vary depending on your relationship to the bride and groom
and your circumstances. The €100 pp is a standard minimum today, but you’d probably give more to close friends or family if you could.

Wow, that’s really late. Anyone know why that might be?

The average age for brides in Ireland in 2024 was 35.9 and it was 37.7 for grooms according to cso, our national statistical body

TBH it would be 100 each so 200 as a couple now for a wedding. You have to cover the cost of your place at the table. It goes back to when there really wasn't enough money in most families to have a big wedding but a big wedding was important. The reason big weddings and big funerals were so important was not just because families were so big so you could get to 200 to 300 no problem with 1st Cousins and partners, but also that for hundreds of years it was the only large freedom of assembly permitted under law along with church services. So weddings and funerals were important for political reasons too because people could gather and discuss current events.

I know, I was wondering exactly that!

Re the minimum spend for cash gift at weddings, how the actual buggering frig do people afford it???!!! On top of new outfits, hotel rooms, travel etc etc 😮

I agree about our ignorance regarding Irish history. It has nothing to do with arrogance or contempt, however. The Irish are generally well-liked in the UK (it would be odd if they weren't, considering that most of us have Irish ancestors). And Irish writers are much admired. But the Irish forget that to the British Ireland and the Irish troubles don't loom very large. In some ways, Irish identity is rooted in opposition to Britain. To the British, however, the great 'events' of our history have little to do with Ireland. They are (working backwards) Dunkirk, the speeches of Churchill, Spitfires and the Battle of Britain, WW1 (the 1914 Christmas truce, the first day of the Somme), the Empire, the wars with Napoleon, Waterloo, the Industrial Revolution, the Civil War and execution of the king, the Elizabethan period (explorers like Drake and Raleigh, writers like Shakespeare and Ben Johnson, etc), the Tudors, the Wars of the Roses and Agincourt, the Norman Conquest/1066, the Anglo-Saxon period, the Vikings, etc, etc.

And those events are bound up with literature. So to us, WW1 means the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, the Victorian period means Tennyson, the Industrial Revolution and its horrors mean Dickens, the Regency period is Jane Austen, the 18th-century is Pope and Blake and Boswell and Johnson, the Civil Wars is Milton, the Elizabethan period is Shakespeare and John Donne, the Medieval period is Chaucer, and so on. Oh, and there's the Romantic poets (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, Shelley), and I guess the Tudors now means Hilary Mantel. You see, there is just so much of it to study – I mean for those who take an interest (many British people are just as ignorant about their own history as they are about Irish history).

I think another reason is that to the British the Irish fall into a special category of 'foreign but not quite foreign,' along with the Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians.

Of course Irish people get divorced, but the rates are lower. They are increasing all the time though.

I’m feeling a bit pissed off now that we didn’t receive envelopes of cash from my DH’s Irish relatives when we got married!

Wrt historic tensions, I think we don’t tend to learn about things in school where the British are on the wrong side of history!

They’re my family! We talk about anything and everything! Including money - see my note about the reasons for the two divorces.

I agree with you on some things. I think Irish people do tend to wait later to get married, everyone I know who had gotten married lately had been together 6+ years before getting married. People don't tend to rush to altar. Possibly because big weddings are still very much a thing here and the cost 30k+ is a big thing to consider when you also have house deposits to save up.

The separating but not divorcing is because divorce was illegal, then you had to wait 5 years to get a divorce, I'm not sure what it is now but I think that is where that comes from. People see it as you don't need a divorce unless you plan to marry again. My mil and fil have been separated for 30+ years, they just never bothered to divorce because neither of them wanted to marry again.

I know lots of women that have had abortions, women who travelled before it was legal, women who bought pills from the Internet and women who have had them here since it was legalised. There is a culture of silence around abortion and I don't think that many people actually reveal it unless they know you have had an abortion too.

I do think that the culture here is very different to the UK, reading mumsnet really brings that home. I prefer Irish reddit to here for that reason, when you post there you know that people are on the same wave length as you.

Who goes to a wedding without giving a present!

I'm irish living in Ireland I don't either , I'm 40s from mayo , I know plenty of divorced people , the one big difference is the way we do death .

The money at weddings thing is really interesting that it’s as standardised as that. An Irish friend came to my wedding (16 years ago) and did exactly that, £100 in an envelope with the card, which I found both incredibly generous and quite strange, as I would never give money and no one else did. I assumed it was a cultural norm but had no idea the amount was so agreed upon!