How does the Irish middle class compare to ours

[Norfolker]

My sister in law is from the Republic & she says the class system in Ireland is there but less obvious than ours.. Not as many private schools but more subtle markers.
She also thinks their state education system is far superior so private schooling is unnecessary. Any Irish on here want to elaborate? I found it interesting.
YABU there is no difference between UK & ROI. Exact same class system no difference in markets.
YANBU different traits contribute to the Irish middle class system

Thanks to everyone who's replied to me and shared their thoughts and experiences with me. I'm sorry that the thread has become a bit derailed, but I for one have found it really educational and enlightening. I learned nothing about Irish history and the disgusting genocide of Irish people by the English, so, I for one always want to learn as much as I can.

Not sure what I'm saying really but that I guess I know someone said they didn't see the point in the thread, but for me it's really helpful x

All the Irish ever did was to fight for freedom from occupation. They never raided or invaded anywhere else. They just wanted to be left alone. Yet ALL of the UK let us be tortured, plundered, pillaged, starved, forced into exile etc. etc. etc. et fucking cetera.

The Welsh didn't stand up for us!

@Hatstrategicallydipped

Wales never stood up to the United Kingdom and said 'hang on a minute - give the Irish a break'. It's like someone who was present at a murder - they may not have committed the actual act, but they were present and complicit. You could have said 'No'. But you chose not to.

That's not true. The Welsh were as bolshie as resistant to English rule as anyone, with rising after rising after being annexed, and it was only with the Tudors (that united English and Welsh royal lines) that things really quietened down. And even then, the Cornish kept giving the Tudors trouble as they weren't too keen on tile from London either.

By the time Cromwell was over here, Wales didn't have a voice as a country any more. Just as individuals, and who knows what they thought.

Sometimes I use Britain and sometimes I refer specifically to the English.
It depends on the context.
If my boyfriend murdered someone innocent tomorrow and I was present and did nothing - would I be charged with anything?

@TeaEgg

I think the topic and conversations around it aren’t nuanced enough - that is the problem. There are so many identities to take into account in UK history. It isn’t one homogenous environment when viewed historically which is one of the problems when teaching it. There isn’t ‘one’ narrative and certainly most historians I know would suggest we need to break down this idea that there is. Some of the media however like to push that and some people who have a very simplified understanding of how it works there.

A good example is the issue of whether we are subjects (of the Crown) or not. Historically, we were (as opposed to being citizens of the State).

In the 80s, Margaret Thatcher pushed through Parliament a statute that altered this so technically, we are citizens. It is a very nuanced point as some traditionalists hold onto it and I think some don’t see it as significant as it was not felt to make much difference to ordinary life.

That’s the kind of thing I think causes heated discussions, creates confusion and imv, needs to be taught well across the board but we just don’t have that civics culture in state schools to the extent you have in Ireland (where you look at European democracy/forms of government/, etc).

I ‘ve derailed again to illustrate my point but I am trying to avoid topics that are contentious.

That's not true. The Welsh were as bolshie as resistant to English rule as anyone, with rising after rising after being annexed, and it was only with the Tudors (that united English and Welsh royal lines) that things really quietened down. And even then, the Cornish kept giving the Tudors trouble as they weren't too keen on tile from London either.

By the time Cromwell was over here, Wales didn't have a voice as a country any more. Just as individuals, and who knows what they thought.

It is true. They stood by and did absolutely nothing.

I laugh when I read about class here. It just doesn't happen in Ireland, as others have said, you'd be shot down with having notions or other similarly sarcastic replies. I do think the education system in Ireland is far superior to UK

You're getting a bit overwrought there Hatstrategicallydipped.

All the Irish ever did was to fight for freedom from occupation. They never raided or invaded anywhere else. I dunno, the poor old Picts might not agree, but we'll never know seeing as their language and culture didn't survive.

@Apileofballyhoo

All the Irish ever did was to fight for freedom from occupation. They never raided or invaded anywhere else. I dunno, the poor old Picts might not agree, but we'll never know seeing as their language and culture didn't survive.

Beat me to it, ballyhoo

Hats you're coming out with some factually inaccurate bollocks that is guilty of exactly the same historical ignorance that you're criticising British posters for. Please stop.

[quote Cacacoisfarraige]@Hatstrategicallydipped

We played Hockey but we all did Fencing too 😀

We did have nuns, but they encouraged us all to go to college and have careers,

They taught everything except (birth control methods - apart from natural method and abstinence) but they left the school one afternoon and a local doctor came in and spoke to our year about STD’s and birth control)

We also learned coding (back in the 80’s). It wasn’t a few paying school. Probably just well run.[/quote]
Yes, in defence of the nuns who taught me mostly in primary school, as there were few teaching nuns, apart from the Head at my secondary I think they, or some of them, were the first feminists I ever encountered.

In a state that was still enthusiastically making contraception difficult to come by, and which had landed WC married women like our grandmothers and mothers with potentially enormous families, and where the marriage bar was still in place during my early years at school, they were certainly voices firmly in favour of female careers and financial independence.

Educate together is non-denominational . They are not fee paying

If memory services they are also sponsors for an Academy chain in Bristol.

Something worth noting with all the different schools talk is that all Irish teachers are trained in the same curriculum, methodologies and best practice so there's an equality built in. This is surely the same in the UK? So I worked in a fee paying school where pupils paid eye watering fees to be in my class and then I left for a designated disadvantaged school, where the children got the same teaching from me but, as I mentioned, better funding and grants. I also taught in an ET where, amazingly, I used the same approaches and techniques. So it makes me laugh when people rave about a particular type of school, it doesn't work like that. My friend paid for a fee paying school, pronouncing her children's reading phenomenal but a year later when my child started in a national school, his reading was better just as good. There's no magic pill but small class numbers are the game changer.

I went to a school that was (and still is) a boarding school, but not a private or fee paying school and I wasn't a boarder. And for all that, very socially mixed in attendance and outcome.

My husband was privately schooled and between going to college in a city and meeting him I definitely noticed the social divide between us rural kids and the city class system (as you would see it through the Pres boys, CBC, Scoil Mhuire and Aloysius in Cork and the Dublin ones -Loreto, Gonzaga, Belvedere, Mounties). I was nearly in my 20s before I really noticed the class system in Ireland but I figured it really is more to be found in urban centres.

I now work in a role in the UK where a large amount of my colleagues are privately schooled and oxbridge educated, and it's very othering - you don't notice as much until you realise that the most prized graduate schemes have spaces for your Duke of Edinburgh's and your extra curricular achievements when nothing like that ever formed a part of a rural Irish education unless your parents were knowledgeable and motivated enough to seek it out for you. Which as mine were generationally farmers, they mostly didn't even know about let alone think would be possible for their child to do - "it was far from such and such you were reared". So I went from thinking class didn't exist, to didn't matter that much except to city kids, to having it be a huge chasm between me and my colleagues in London.

I notice it even more now the kids are in school. We moved to the best area near the best schools that we could afford to do - because postcode differences matter here for the school catchment - and now we are siloed in a suburb of middle class professionals who are just like us, who are our age and education level and in professional jobs just like ours. I never meet or interact with someone from a different social class much because between work and the house/school, I don't go anywhere.

I tried to explain it once to my extended family (her a local solicitor, him a builder) but I didn't do it very well and I don't think they really got it either.

@Hatstrategicallydipped

All of 'Great' Britain allowed the Irish to be massacred and decimated.

6 million Jews were murdered. We remember that.

2 million Irish were starved to death. We're supposed to forget this.

Yeah the Irish really helped those 6 million Jews, and all the other victims of WW2, didn't they. What with their position of neutrality and refusal to support the allies. FFS.

Why didn't the Irish help the Welsh when we were being invaded in the 12th century if you're going to start twatting around like this. Or you could get over yourself and your victimhood and look forward not back.

@Hatstrategicallydipped

All of 'Great' Britain allowed the Irish to be massacred and decimated.

6 million Jews were murdered. We remember that.

2 million Irish were starved to death. We're supposed to forget this.

Just the utter gall of using Jews murdered by the Nazis to make your point about Irish subjugation when the Taoiseach of the time literally signed the book of condolence for Hitler's death and met with the German ambassador to express his condolences in person (was the only leader of any Western European country to do so). Wow.

Actually, that is a particularly vile and ignorant viewpoint and I will explain why:

1. there was a civil war that the Irish were very recently fighting on home turf (the republic of Ireland as it is today was born in 1937 out of the Irish Free State - just before war broke out on the continent) and they just could not justifiably raise an army at the time, and

2. 50.000 Irishmen and women still felt strongly enough about WWII that they did go over to Great Britain to sign up as soldiers in the British army and work as nurses, despite any overt political neutrality from the capital and in some cases at great personal cost, and

3. there are Irish grandparents alive today who came to Ireland in the 40s as child evacuees and never went home, and

4. Allied planes were permitted to land and refuel in Ireland despite "neutrality" and were facilitated to give them every advantage.

Not to mention of course that the British didn't go to war for the Jews. They didn't even know what was happening in German concentration camps until the camps were liberated at the very end of the war. That's a facetious argument and another display of ignorance.

The role Ireland played in WWII was not a loud one, but considering how recently it had clawed back its independence it still played a significant role, even if politically it kept its nose out. De Valera's response to Churchill's VE Day speech was very gracious considering the level of spite they faced, i thought.

Can’t deny there is some sort of social system in Ireland, but there is also so much more social mixing in my experience - at least in the countryside. In school, everyone from the doctor’s children to those who came from families that have been drawing the dole for decades played together. Now, we’re older my friends include a social worker married to a guy who didn’t even get his junior cert and does odd jobs. I know a person with a postgrad and professional job married to a lorry driver. That isn’t strange in ireland. But in over a decade in the UK, I’ve found that there is much less social mixing. And people seem to be pigeon holed so much more quickly. I work in a fairly exclusive industry and many of my colleagues went to Oxbridge. There is some weird unwritten divide between the brits who went to private schools and oxbridge and those who didn’t. It’s painful but fascinating to watch. They can’t place Irish people, which can very much be to our advantage as a very smart, older and posh Irish lawyer once told me.

Yes @twoofusburningmatches especially if you can moderate your accent a bit!

I have a fairly neutral accent - just Irish enough to be obvious if you know what sounds you're listening for, but my accent isn't obvious enough that other Irish people can work it out easily unless I make it very broad (I've been asked if I'm Canadian/Dutch/Russian/Swedish/Belgian!)

On the other hand when I'm at home snd I ever have to ring up a person or a business and ask for something, I make my accent and voice/mannerisms much more Irish. In the UK a regional accent is looked down on; at home it sounds way more friendly and a posh/neutral accent is more likely to get people's hackles up.

I think DeValera was speaking out of both sides of his mouth as it were.
Allied airmen who were dropped into the Free State as it then was, were safely brought across the border.
Yes, there was a bit of the usual "England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity" but in reality we weren't quite neutral.
Remember the young female meterological worker in Mayo, keeping a very close eye on the incoming weather as it crossed the Atlantic.
Her information was of great benefit to the Allies as they prepared for the DDay landings.

Her name was Maureen Sweeney and she worked at Blacksod Bay weather station.
Google : How an Irish Weather Woman helped win the war.

@LadyEloise that sounds interesting

@YerWanIsGettinNotions
Not to mention of course that the British didn't go to war for the Jews. They didn't even know what was happening in German concentration camps until the camps were liberated at the very end of the war. That's a facetious argument and another display of ignorance.

I would dispute this. The Polish giveaways exiled in London and wrote an open letter to all allied governments mentioning Germany’s specific treatment of the Jewish people. It was known, imv, well before Attenborough’s team discovered the first camp.

There is an excellent book about what was also known in the US about the camps. I’ll try and get the name if anyone is interested.

Polish giveaways should say Polish government