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.

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!

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!

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 .

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

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

The girls I know doing it now don’t seem to be traumatised, or see it more than an optional rite of passage. I have twin girls living across the road who had their debs this year — for a night they were gravy-coloured and wearing eyelashes that must have obscured their vision. The rest of the time, they’re playing camogie at a high level and rowing, and running in and out in GAA shirts and runners without giving a thought to how they present in terms of conventional femininity.

It’s the Rose of Tralee I’d like to end.

I’m in Liverpool and sometimes I think we have a lot more common ground between Ireland than we do with Southern England. It always makes me laugh on MN when people are enraged by unannounced visitors, and who are scared of opening the front door. When I was young everyone just had an open house and you’d just let yourself in through the back door. That went for all family, friends and neighbours.

Irish funerals have evening events attached to them to facilitate people who can’t make a day time funeral. There is a removal and possibly a wake or a rosary at the home or funeral home.

You might do a 4 hour round trip after work to go to a removal for 30 minutes and offer your condolences. It is a mark of respect and support.

I think having the debs to look forward to is good in exam year. And it's the end of an era when the year group splits up.
But the drama is high level! And the food around the local hotels isn't great. I must ask my kids if they enjoyed it?

Sure the communion and the debs are just practice for the wedding!

The posh people in cork have less notions than the posh people in SoCo Dublin.

Not possible to live in the same sort of bubble I suppose. There is definitely a posh cork accent but I’m not sure it really matters to people outside of cork.

Fair.

The percentage of students attending fee paying schools is about the same in Ireland and the U.K. About 7% in each.

Fees in Ireland are much lower than in the U.K. and students tend to fall in to one of two categories.
Outside Dublin there are Protestant schools that were to traditionally cater for those who didn’t want to go to the local non fee paying Catholic schools. The Protestant block grant is available so less wealthy people of a minority religion would have some or all of their fees paid for indirectly by the State,

South Dublin fee paying schools, some of these are also Protestant some students can get grants but it is mostly better off families of any religion or none.

I was born and raised in Ireland, have lived in England for over 15 years.

The 100 euro at weddings thing really threw me - I wasn't aware of it at all and I wondered why, then I realised that I've been to only one Irish wedding, despite having a massive family and lots of Irish friends. Why? Because my cousins didn't invite cousins (I didn't either) as there are just too many of them (over 100) and only one - yes one solitary person - out of my group of friends growing up is married and she had a tiny ceremony and invited nobody. Every other person I grew up with is single and I'm in my 40s. Isn't that mad? To totally buck the trend, I got married at 25 and am still married.

In terms of differences, the main one that stood out to me was how death is handled, as others have mentioned. My sister's friend died at 17 and we went down to her house to see the body laid out on the bed. People were lying with her, touching her and such. There were lots of children there. When my DH's English granny died, I was totally shocked at how the whole thing went - I was asked to keep the chidren (who were small at the time) at home rather than go to the funeral, which I was very upset about (but didn't say anything). No one would ever do that in Ireland. There was a tiny reception at DH's aunt's house afterwards and it was awful - no stories told, no laughing. It was years ago and it still upsets me - I got in a panic with DH aftewards saying he must not allow a funeral like that to be held for me - I want everyone there, I want it loud. I didn't realise how important it was to me until I experienced something so flat and lacking in energy.

The other small difference is chattiness. Every time I go back to Ireland I'm always surprised when some stranger starts talking to me. I'm used to everyone minding their own business in England so I'm not prepared for the random conversations at bus stops and shop counters. I don't know what I prefer - sometimes I like a random chat, sometimes I'm more in the mood to just get on with it and ignore everyone!

…students tend to fall in to one of two categories. Outside Dublin there are Protestant schools that were to traditionally cater for those who didn’t want to go to the local non fee paying Catholic schools

At least half of the fee-paying schools in Munster are Catholic @ChimneyPot.

My dd spent a bit of time in London a couple of years ago and was prepared to be lonely...she couldn't believe how chatty people were working in transport and cafes and places. I have found London Underground staff to be very pleasant when I look confused.
I worked in the south of England for 7 years...I never knew people were going no contact and not letting electrician use toilets etc!