Anyone raising English kids/kids in England and finding some bits a bit odd?

[HolyShmoly]

Long time, no mumsnet but I'm hoping I'll find some sympathisers. DH and I are both Irish, from Donegal and are living in England for a number of years. We have kids born in England who are now school age and much more aware of their Englishness. Its really weird.
We were home recently and driving through the North she was excited because she saw her flags. The same areas that we'd be praying not to have to stop in, she thought looked welcoming. The women's world cup I was encouraging her to celebrate England. She'll be starting history this year and the burden to ensure she doesn't see just one side of the story feels large.

I dont want them to feel like they can't celebrate where they come from, but celebrating England feels like I'm breaking a lifetime of conditioning.

Unless you were directly affected by the Troubles, "deep trauma" is a tad extreme.

Truth is we barely noticed it (bar checkpoints in towns, helicopters flying overhead every now and then, and of course the obvious housing and school divisions among religious lines which ridiculously still exist to this day).

I had nearly 15 years of the troubles before the ceasefire, and although it was always there, it was largely in the background. We had trips to Portrush (Barry's), Giants Causeway, Newcastle, Safari Park, Coleraine Jet Centre, Funderland at King's Hall etc. I recall nothing but a bloody good time. The only time I had to be extra vigilant was at Windsor Park (going there as a catholic was a bit of a no no)...should add I went to see Liverpool pre season games, and once to watch the Republic of Ireland play the north...had to be silent throughout for that one!)

What helped my get over any religious division was going to uni in England, that's when I woke up to the backwardness of the whole thing. My admiration for the English really went through the roof then.

from the first post! Where she stated that celebrating the ethnicity of her children would "break a life time of conditioning" - the very definition of racism!

I am not English, I am from a refugee family - I absolutely do not understand why the protection from racism in this country never extends to the white English

I'm the same age as you @DeeCee77 , from ROI but live in NI now. I don't know of many people our age from NI who don't carry the scars in some way or other. Whether from a particular traumatic incident or growing up in a literal warzone or dealing with their parents' trauma. I only moved to NI in the 00s and still had a nasty incident during the flegs protests that could have killed me.

I once attended a conference on the long-term impacts of that trauma at a societal level and let's just say it was mind boggling. It doesn't do NI any favours to ignore it, it needs to be faced up to - and funded!

I also don't know anyone our age who has any truck with religious division, although of course those people are out there. Mostly mixed or international marriages in our circle. But the scars are there.

As someone who isn't from here, I think NI should be really fucking proud of how far it's come. Not many societies have managed that over the course of human history. NI should shout its achievements from the rooftops and hold its head up high, it's a truly wonderful place to live.

An early BF from uni days lived in Dungannon NI, and I stayed with him and his family in the v early 70s. C of I? anyway not Catholic. We went to Belfast a couple times - British Army checkpoints, and staff searching you before you went into shops, quite unnerving. In Dungannon, I bought a belt in a literal firesale from a shop that had been torched. When BF's parents rang his college a week before the end of term (English uni), his face turned white. When he rang back, he was relieved to find that they had mixed up dates, and had been expecting him back a week too early.

@DeeCee77 I don't understand what point you are trying to make in your reply to me upthread.

Apologies if I came across as insulting.

Your cultural identity is what defines you, ie. where you were born/reared and developed (your nationality). If you are from London, but hold an Irish passport from your parent(s), you are a Londoner of Irish descent. You are not Irish, likewise neither are people from america of Irish descent (the difference is much greater with the latter comparison given the vast cultural difference between Ireland and america).

To take it to the extreme, if we didn't have nationalities we might as well all just say we are African as we all descended from there.

My children were born in England, but we have complicated roots. My children think of themselves as English, although they're in the process of applying for Irish passports! We are the sort of people who will celebrate the opening of an envelope, so we have St Pats, Epiphany, Burns Night.. anything going. Sport-it depends on the event and the sport. England for football, Ireland for rugby. Sometimes whoever's either winning or the massive underdog.

Someone with an Irish passport is an Irish citizen and thus literally Irish. Just because they don't have the same cultural experiences does not change that.

I remember it. I remember bombs going off at night, being evacuated from school, shopping centres and cafes, bomb threats coming through to my house (my dad was a prominent public figure in the town and he passed the information to the police). I remember it being more than background noise and I remember being frightened that I was going to be killed. I remember a gang of boys following one jight and calling me a Fenian bitch. That's obviously a very light experience compared to my parents recollections.

Sometimes my mother will remember something from the 70s and will cry. Like, when a British soldier was killed in front of her and everyone in her estate was laughing, except her, because he was only a teenager, younger than her at the time. Or her sister's boyfriend who had a total breakdown after being in a pub with people one minute, and then being surrounded by their limbs the next.

Its so unbelievably reductive to think 'yeah but I'd a great time in Barry's (I had too)' when the life that you were living was built on the shoulders of our parents' experiences. Every one of our parents (of that generation) has a horrible story to tell. Yes, we got off lightly, and it was in the background for the most part. But it was there.

I am not traumatised by the Troubles, but I known that lots of people were. The ceasefire didn't just happen and then Northern Ireland emerged as some kind of context-less, blank page. Some communities feel it more than others.

If you are from London, but hold an Irish passport from your parent(s), you are a Londoner of Irish descent.

No, that is not what another Londoner would call you (at least not this one), if they knew your background. They would call you London Irish

I'm an immigrant in Ireland and I find it weird sometimes that my children are Irish. It's not that I dislike it, they are great, fluent in Irish and very, well Irish. It's still just weird sometimes, having children that are growing up really quite differently to how you did, in a different culture, in a different schooling system where they learn everything in a language I don't speak etc. And yeah them supporting Ireland in football etc feels strange. I love Ireland, have no complaints apart from the rain and think my children have great lives here.

I kind of get what you are saying OP, it's not that you dislike the fact that kids are English but it feels a bit odd sometimes.

Hmm...I'm going to throw this one out there (I may be wrong). You coming from the south, which really has been tranquility in comparison to the north, perhaps see the issue ("trauma") as being bigger because of where you are from? I'm probably hardened to issues having lived here from birth.

For those of us not in Belfast, while the troubles was always there, it didn't overtly affect our daily lives. It most definitely wasn't a warzone. For anyone closely related to the nearly 3000 who were killed, their experience will have been very different.

Quite the opposite in fact, although it's a reasonable hypothesis.

In truth I grew up in Dublin very ignorant about the North, even though my dad lived in Belfast in the 70s. I had no connections there, never visited, typical teenager paying zero attention to the news and never found history particularly interesting. I met DH at 18 and moved up in my early 20s and was very blaze, rolly eyed about the whole thing really.

It's only as I've spent more time here, gotten to know more people that I appreciate what happened. My understanding at nearly 40 is certainly very different to my understanding at 23 - although I guess we can all say that about most things

i would perhaps counter that what you thought was normal was often far from it - see the post about visiting and the security in shops etc.

I think it’s hard for someone with no connections to NI to understand the dynamics at all. My father was brought up in Derry in the 30s and 40s, in a Scottish family, moved to London in 1949 and pretty much never went back. He had dementia for many years at the end of his life and was in a care home. At a point where he barely knew who I was, he could somehow still magically tell which (mostly Eastern European) carers were Catholic. He was atheist himself and had no personal prejudice against them, but knowing who was Catholic was so hard-wired into his mind as a essential thing that it was literally one of the last things to leave him. Whereas growing up in Southeast England, I could know someone for years and have no idea of their religion.

I also think that those of us who lived through the Troubles, even in England, have had some exposure to these issues that younger people simply haven’t. Endless IRA bomb scares in London, U2, Gerry Adams getting voice dubbed on the BBC - it seems like those under 30 in England basically have no idea about any of this, let alone its underlying causes. It’s bizarre how it’s barely mentioned when it dominated domestic politics for years.

Tony Cascarino? John Aldridge?

Ray Houghton (love the man), would you call him Irish?

Ronaldinho holds a Spanish passport, I dont think anyone would call him Spanish (although, him spending five years at Barcelona, he has a greater claim to be Spanish than anyone who has never set foot in Ireland has being Irish).

My fil was an immigrant from Ireland. We named our ds Patrick after him and he was very pleased. But he was insistent that we never used Paddy as a shortening- the use of the name as a slur was still very raw, even after 40 years. The immigrant experience is still very close under the surface.

@WhiteArsenic yes-I was telling my young adult children about the bomb scares, and the routine evacuations from tube trains and the taking away of waste bins and they were dumbstruck. They knew it as history, but not the social impact...

Anyway I don't think digressions about the Troubles are of any use to OP so I'll shut up now.

Back to the immigrant experience of raising children in a different culture to your own, which is surely always a little weird.

Not so wrt 'very good reasonwhy you live in England' if youre implying a negative about Ireland.

Many Irish people have very deep and broad connections with Britain. It's not the same as being Scandinavian/Italian/Greek and ending up in Britain. Irish people feel the same way about New York and Boston and maybe even Chicago. It's 'one of ours'. We are gradually taking over the world

Ireland was once part of the United Kingdom. Irish people have come and gone from the UK for centuries, served in the armed forces, worked as engineers, doctors, nurses, etc, as well as bus drivers, navvies, construction workers... I know a lot of Irish engineers from many generations who worked in Britain for a few years and then returned to Ireland, then returned, went to school with girls whose childhoods were divided between Dublin and London - lots of back and forth. Murphy Group is a big engineer employer. Guess where the original Murphy came from...

@DeeCee77
Yes, the Enlightenment certainly took hold in Britain, to the extent that only recently members of the Royal Family couldn't marry a Catholic. Truly enlightened...

And the industrial revolution that was fueled by the capital that came from the labour enslaved people and the wealth of the colonies, which were subjugated and exploited by force and guile - yes, that was progressive too.

The shop being torched, that's an extreme example, and one I never witnessed.

There are only two times in my life when I've been unnerved in shops. The first time was in Dublin when I was warned beforehand about pickpockets in the city..each shop I entered I was literally scanning the place for potential thieves (I did know of the reputation of Dublin beforehand via going to Croke Park to see Tyrone as we would park the car as far away from the city as possible). The second time was in England, in a particular city..they had perspex screens in shops so you couldn't actually touch the food, it was passed through a hatch (thought I was at the bank).

So @DeeCee77 - arbiter of all Irishness - what am I? Both parents Irish, was born in Asia as its where Dad was working at the time. Growing up we moved countries, often continents every 2-3 years. The longest I lived in any one country before I moved back to Ireland for college at 17 was 3.5 years in a South American country - so not raised in one place by any means. Every summer we'd go back to my grandparents in Ireland. It's the only culture that's been consistent throughout my life, and the only passport I'm entitled to is an Irish one. Where am I from to you?

And yeah, @DeeCee77, my American born children are Irish because the Irish government says they are. You are Irish because the British and Irish governments say you are. You couldn't always claim that.

Do you want to explain your objection to the Irishness of all those individuals or can we draw our own conclusions?

I'm sure I'm not the only one finding your posts here really, really offensive.

Nope.