Differences (rep Ireland) Irish V UK

[Sillysandy]

I am Irish living in Ireland. My DH is British, he is an immigrant who grew up in London but had lived for 20 years in Ireland when I met him.

I discovered mumsnet about 8 years ago when I took on a sort of stepmum role and was flabbergasted at some of the stories, attitudes and opinions.

I still found the site extremely helpful, often giving me clarity on situations which would cause me a lot of angst.

However when I talk to friends and family members living in the UK I realise that a lot is to do with cultural differences.

It's amazing given how close geographically we are.

Attitudes to money, marriage, divorce, wedding gifts, abortion, house purchases, communication with friends are so far from anything I've seen in my circles.

To give my pov; (these are all generalisations) we get married later, we stay married, we don't consider abortion unless it's very particular circumstances, we are indirect about money "I'll get this one, you can get the next one (but it is LAW you only accept if you are buying back)" and sending bank details for a small amount would be horrifyingly rude, you only attend a wedding with a card containing at least 100 euro pp, you usually get married in your mid thirties, your kids are mainly all with the one father, we hide behind humour until we know a person very well, we don't report benefit fraud, we laugh a lot more... That's just off the top of my head.

The other thing is that most Irish people know all about English Irish historical tensions but many English people are utterly oblivious.

YABU You're talking out of your ass
YANBU The differences are enormous

I'd love to hear some thoughts on this. In my line of work now I do a weekly call with my UK based team and I always notice subtle differences in attitude.

Fair enough! I've been in Derry for 15ish years and once you really get to know people you realise that most outlooks can be shaped by Nationalist/Irish or Unionist/British backgrounds and also by age. People are just very superficial when you don't really know them for obvious reasons.

I'm a little confused on what you mean by the comment on abortion, from the women I know who've had abortions both North and South the reasons ranged from, don't want kids/feel too young/can't afford them/family complete/wrong partner - I would broadly assume the reasons for British women to be similar.

Could at least some of these differences be perhaps due to the majority of people in the Irish Republic being Catholic (69.1% as of the 2022 census), whereas the majority of the UK population isn't?

There is also, of course, the not insignificant fact that although for the most part we speak the same language and are geographically close, we are actually two different countries, with different laws, traditions and customs. The same probably goes for USA/Canada, Australia/NZ and Germany/Austria.

I'm pretty sure the OP is talking about contemporary Ireland, so not relevant to your parents' or grandmother's generation.
I think we're all aware of the impact of the Catholic Church.
I am Irish and have lived in the UK, and I agree with a lot of your points.
I hate the money given at weddings thing and certainly never said anything unkind about the gifts we were given, although I have been married for 23 years and I think it has changed a bit in that time.
Posters mentioning Irish people they know who are divorced are missing the point, the stats are very clear that we have a much lower divorce rate.
None of my close friends or family are divorced and I am in my fifties. I think it is due to people getting married later and not until they have been together for quite a few years.
At least I hope that people are not staying in miserable marriages.

Do. It’s €100 per person (adult), just so you know. It does seem to be quite different to many weddings in the UK in that sense, just judging from MN threads. (I’m not sure of the situation re weddings in NI.)

Yabu but because half of what people wrote on here is not typical British. The main difference is the money in a wedding card because in most circles that is pretty rude, either it’s a younger couple and they have a list/bring a gift of your choice which could be a gift card or you do not bring a gift at all, I’ve recently married and like every other wedding I’ve been to where the couple is over 30 we stayed do not brings gifts on our invitation and collected food for the food bank if people really wanted to bring something (we collected 14 large bags!)

I would also agree with the €100 ppl as a wedding present at the minimum

We tend to buy gifts (from a list) or donate (whatever amount we want) to a Honeymoon fund/charity/whatever.

typo

minumum of €100 is most definitely a thing :-D

Irishs weddings are very different. Usually no kids and if the sesh doesnt go until at least 5am in the residence bar it was a shite wedding

You must under the rule of death place bets on how long the wedding speech lasts or pass the glass everything someone says beautiful

My english SIL is mad for sending thank you cards and annvisary cards if there is an occasion there is a card sent

the whole history part/ 800 years she was unaware of - but doesnt really get the jokes. Especially jokes about the differences between catholics and protestants (protestants but their toaster away and dont live their clothes pegs on the line) IYKUK

Can confirm the going rate for weddings in NI seems a bit less. I was invited to one a couple of years ago that didn't have a registry and asked colleagues for advice and the consensus was £100 between me and DP was very generous which I found hard to believe. It's still something I majorly struggle with 😂 we give 200 eur for a friend and 250 for close friend when we attend a wedding down south.

Having lived in Ireland for 30 years as an English person, married to an Irish person and children born in both England and Ireland and a mixed religious marriage, the biggest cultural difference is definitely funerals. But there are huge cultural differences between rural and urban areas here. How our community works in Co. Clare would be a world away from how Dublin functions. There is also quite a significant difference between coastal counties on the west coast and midland counties. Coastal counties generally being more progressive around social policies. Clare elected first Catholic to houses of parliament prior to independence, first women TD, first POC representative and first goat to the final of the nose of Tralee. North Clare has the highest proportion of Syrian and Ukrainian refugees in the Country at around 20 percent of our population without a single incidence of xenophobic violence reported.
The history thing in schools is because nearly all Irish history involves Britain whereas British just isn't as focused on one Country. No excuse for not knowing the basics, but that's how it is.
There is an undercurrent of respect for getting away with things like not paying taxes at local levels with 2nd jobs or claiming some benefit not entitled to. This harks back to being governed from London and sticking it to the foreign tax collectors was seen as a good thing.

I’m British, born & raised in England, and of Irish heritage. All four of my grandparents were Irish & my mum was born in Co Fermanagh. I have lived & worked all over the U.K. & Ireland (except Wales) and in my experience the similarities between most of us who inhabit these islands vastly outweigh the differences. Whether we are Irish (NI or ROI), Scottish, or from the English North & Midlands, we are all pretty similar.

Except for one group.

Middle class people from the South of England are the odd ones out. They are very different from the rest of us. More reserved, more formal, more likely to hide behind manners, social codes & elaborate politeness. More likely to use language & dress as class signifiers to judge & categorise others. Where did you go to school? How do you hold your cutlery? Where do you go on holiday? What books do you read? Etc etc.

I'm I rish living in Ireland(born in the UK and have siblings in the UK) and agree with most of what you've said(disagree re divorce, know alot of people who are). Definitely agree with minimum €100 a head for weddings.

I think the majority of Irish people have a fair idea of what's going on in the UK, would know who the UK prime minister is etc, but I think a significant proportion of English people have no idea what's going on in Ireland.

British (English) history is definitely diluted/censored in terms of what is taught in schools here. Not surprising considering how shameful it is!

Agree with that. As Yorkshire born and bred I have much more in common with rural Irish people than Southern elite English people. Everyone says how friendly people are in Ireland, which they generally are, but coming from Yorkshire I didn't notice it that much because I was used to people being friendly.😁

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!

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 .

You're really missing the point here. You don't ask about money or talk about money. You discreetly find the best man and hand him a wedding card with money in it.

Who goes to a wedding without giving a present!

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.

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

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!

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

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.

Fantastic post, really interesting thanks.

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 😮