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.

And yet Irish writers write, and have always written, about Irish history or contemporary, and have chiefly written about it in English, so there’s very little excuse for a literature-attuned English person not to have encountered key moments in Irish history via Yeats, Bowen, Muldoon etc.

Exactly. I’m always interested in the logistics which allow this to be seamlessly managed within 48 hours in Ireland, often in less, but which takes three weeks or more in England. I imagine part of it is that far more Irish people are still buried rather than cremated, and many of us have family plots, so it’s not about waiting for a crematorium slot. I wonder if the fact that priests are dying off will be what finally halts fast funerals, for those who still want a Catholic one.

Agreed on the SoCo Dublin thing! I grew up another city in Ireland, left for decades, moved back five years ago, and an English friend who moved to Blackrock around the same is always asking me questions about the social dynamics of her area, and I have to tell her that’s not ‘my’ Ireland and functions very differently to the places I know.

Same.

The funerals thing is down to the size of the population and the fact that so many churches have graveyards that are full or the churches have been sold and turned into homes. Using Bristol as an example. It's the 10th biggest city in the UK with a population of about half a million. It has 2 council crematoria (3 if you count the one just outside in South Gloucestershire) and I believe one Muslim one (we have a big Muslim population). That's what causes the slow turnaround.
The other thing about attending funerals is that many of us in the UK struggle to get time off work to attend funerals. My employer only grants compassionate leave for attending the funeral of a parent, child ,grandparents or spouse. It's usually only one day and any more for travel is taken from valuable annual leave.

Yeah, we had a colleague’s brother pass away at the weekend and a lot of us went to the funeral. One of the longest funerals and the biggest funeral I’ve ever seen. We left work at 12 and just went straight home after. No expectation that we catch up on work.

That’ll be the class thing again.
Some (higher class) UK nationals DO know about Irish history. The majority don’t though.

I agree with much of what OP says.

None of my friends/ acquaintances/ even work colleagues have had children to more than one partner. Even if they’re separated and with someone new, they haven’t gone on to have another set of kids with them.

Wedding gifts- yes, money, but it’s really bad form for the couple to share who gave what. Thank you cards aren’t as much as a thing- from our (big) family, only us and another cousin bothered with them.

People are noticeably older when they get married- I’m mid 30s, but got married at 27 and my sisters in law called me a child bride. People tend to get married a bit younger in the north in the more religious Protestant denominations. Smaller weddings are more unusual- there’s definitely more of an expectation of the big, 150+ people church + nice hotel do.

I do think we think we’re friendlier than we are. Irish friendliness is very superficial- we’ll be lovely to strangers in quick interactions on public transport, in a queue or at a bar, but it’s harder to get beyond that. I remember working with Spanish and Italian colleagues who said it was actually very difficult to become “proper” friends with an Irish person as friendliness which would naturally progress to becoming friends back home didn’t follow the same rules here.

I’ve also noticed that there’s an acceptance of ripping the English which wouldn’t be accepted for literally any other nationality (except maybe Americans). I’ve heard a few younger Irish who have made the decision to move to England and upon meeting an English partner and buying a house, they give out that their children will be English and have English accents, as if this was a situation they were somehow press ganged into.

That’s interesting. Would you have some examples of the SoCo Dublin divide @GentlemenPreferBuzzcuts?

I know there are urban/rural differences in Ireland, but as you grew up in another city I’d have thought the lifestyle differences wouldn’t be as marked. For example, I know sending children to private schools is big in SoCo Dublin, but there are private schools in cities like Cork too.

I agree on the weddings and death and GAA points. Getting married older was always a thibg, my grannies were both in their late 20s when they married. Children play sports at all levels to way older than in the UK, and Irish kids rarely leave school before 18 anymore, as PP pointed out our 3rd level education rate is very high. My English sil son is leaving school for an apprenticeship aged 16 and my Irish family are horrified at the thought.
There is loads of other subtle cultural differences which trip up foreigners, but you have to live here to really feel them. Class in Ireland has much more variation too but being sound outweighs almost anything!

@Scentofgeranium
Here's a list of fee paying schools, Dublin has by far the most. Outside Dublin the fee paying sector is mostly the old CoI or Quaker schools which usually offer a free fee scheme to Protestants. SoCo Dublin is a world of its own.
List of fee-charging schools in Ireland - Wikipedia share.google/KSrgL8Nm8G7Y0f7E2

@turkeyboots
I know Cork city has three second-level fee paying schools, all Catholic. I also know that’s far fewer than Dublin, but the population is much smaller too. So a similar sort of vibe maybe? That’s what I’m asking pp really. What else makes SoCo Dublin different to, say, Cork?

I’m from neither city for what it’s worth, but closer to Cork. And my question was off the point of the thread, sorry.

No, I was responding to @Dappy777’s somewhat condescending post about important moments in English history and how they are reflected in English literature. I’m not suggesting English people in general should have read vast amounts of Irish literature if they’re aren’t readers, but if you’re a reader, in England, who reads in English, there’s absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t be extremely well-informed about, say, the war of independence, the civil war, the Troubles (to stick to 20thc Irish history only, for argument’s sake) by reading the major Irish fiction writers and poets. If I’ve read Sassoon, Brooke, Rosenberg, Owen, as an Irish person, then Yeats is hardly a stretch for an English reader.

Do they live rurally? I can't imagine anyone i know referring to a gay couple as flatmates. I live in Dublin though, (waves to fellow south Dubliners). I agree with most of what the op says but I would add asking someone to remove their shoes on entering your house, everyone i know would consider it extremely rude to ask this, we would rather give the floors a good scrub after they left, swearing profusely all the while.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.