Is the Irish/Northern Irish social class system the same as UK?

[merrymaryquitecontrary]

Visited Ireland recently and was wondering if there is the same obsession with class as UK? If so, what would the signifiers be? Do people recoil in horror if you use a certain word instead of another 'posher' word? Eg red sauce vs ketchup in the UK. There's no point in this thread other than me just wondering.

This was the peer group my ds moved into when he moved to Dublin. He was in a shared house, working full time and studying. His colleagues were living at home, getting dinner made for them, clothes washed and ironed etc. And no rent.
He survived!

Why would they move out? One of the benefits of being from Dublin is that you save all that rent!

Sounds familiar. Same thing with priests. In every parish there would be a nice understanding priest and he was usually a lowly curate. Possibly from a poor farming background. The parish priest would be more snooty and distant. It's all over now of course. There aren't enough priests period - so they take what they can get !

Paul Howard author of the Ross O' Carroll Kelly books gets the SoCoDu set pretty spot on as have you @SeulementUneFois.

I was once berated on Craicnet for saying there was "class" in Ireland. Obviously by someone not familiar with SoCoDu

‘Reggie from the Blackrock Road’ performs the same function for Cork social classifications. Though I suspect he is totally incomprehensible for anyone not from Cork…

I think formerly there was Montenotte Mother of Five who commented on Cork?The sort of lady...like me...who talks about My Son The Accountant .
Cork has an excellent class of people who know each other from the RCYC. They all sail. Like the Coveney family. The women are mostly called Fiona.

SoCoDu is a world of its own! I can't imagine why anybody would aspire to be a part of that but each to their own. I would not say they are an upper class though. Middle class like a lot of Ireland but with notions!

temporarily

Controversial!
Interestingly on this thread we have discussed that there are differences in perception between groups of people in both jurisdictions.
And I think a lot of prejudice between northerners and southerners and vice versa.
Sometimes I wonder if Michelle O'Neil is inwardly telling Mary Lou to go back down south and stop popping up beside her.

@mirrensidhe

😁😁 😁😂

Surely if it wasn't in the U.K., it wouldn't be Northern Ireland?

Your post reminds me why I'm glad I got out.

Geographically it would be northern, same as Munster is southern. It would cease to be the six counties and up north for shopping.

In Dublin it all hinges on your accent.

I think I remember hearing a few years ago when there was a private maternity hospital in Cork (didn't it close when the new maternity unit in CUH opened) that it was a discreet way to find out your social standing. "Where did you have your baby" was a way of checking if any new mums you met were the right type of person. Any Cork ladies would be better placed to tell us if that's true or not😀😀😀

The maternity thing in NI is mad. Loads go private but you can only get antenatal care privately. Everyone has to have their baby in an NHS hospital!! No guarantee of a private room for anyone.

I had my baby in the old Erinville in Cork with the Protestant obstetrician. He had been a Methodist medical missionary. I think he only saw public patients.
However ladies in the hairdressers spent a huge amount of time discussing their consultants in the bons. So definitely a way of knowing who was who.
My other babies were born in the old Jubilee in Belfast. I had a domino with the second as I hated being in the post natal ward. I suspect domino deliveries was very middle class.
I assume Mount Carmel in Dublin was where Sorcha OCarroll Kelly gave birth before it ceased maternity care.

In NI and Ireland as others said it works on a different basis - can be town vs country, religion and money.
You can definitely buy your way up the class scale to an extent, I know a high % of now wealthy people who had grandparents living in a council house, but there are also the non-wealth associated class indicators.
People are often talked about ‘coming from
money’ or having land. Rurally people commonly have very large self-builds on relatively low incomes/careers if they have family land.
With the foreign direct investment here now there is more opportunity to earn well and be affluent but a lot of the professions that have less cache in the UK are held in higher esteem here eg teachers are considered more MC than they would be in England and there previously would have been less opportunities for corporate careers and these traditional careers are available in rural areas too.

There are very few private schools with the grammar school system, although they are skewed towards the MC there is still more mingling of children and the capacity to move up based on academic achievement. There is a tendency to stay here for uni too.
Snobbery and ‘having notions’ is a big concept here too as others have mentioned, accents seem to work on a micro level to indicate class, status, etc.

I find this topic endlessly fascinating! The class concept here is so nuanced compared to the more straight cut English class system.

Also everyone knows everyone (or can find out about you) so there is a lot of judgement, speculation and subsequent class categorisation derived from that.

Depending on when this was, @eggandonion, the Protestant obstetrician was also a thing because he would prescribe contraception, and knew where would dispense it.

As far as I can gather, after my mother had four pregnancies in four years, he put her on the pill, though, depending on which family member you listen to, he either (1) didn’t tell her what it was so she wouldn’t be outraging her Catholic conscience, or (2) didn’t tell her because he was being high-handed, or (3) he did tell her but she didn’t understand and just took it anyway, because he was a doctor. AND a Protestant. My mother genuinely believes Protestants are glossier and better educated and ‘a nicer type of person’ than Catholics…

So it’s possible I don’t have double the number of siblings because of him! We were born in the Bons, the Victoria, and Erinville. I have no idea what influenced the choice — we were dirt poor.

I think the protestant obstetrician might also have been more sympathetic towards women with pregnancies in difficulty? I was happy to be with him.

Protestants are glossier🤣 You win the thread!

There was (probably still is) a Cork Yacht club set, from the merchant prince families and their hangers-on, that would make SoCoDo look like amateur hour. But not an aristocracy, despite the 'm p' tag, money from (generations of) trade and proud of it. The cream of the country, rich and thick.

Was talking the other day to someone from school and we both felt the nuns in our small school downmarket convent that had a hierarchy of 1: top form, town girls from well off or professional families who had gone to the Convent primary school 2: middle form (us), country girls from farming or small business backgrounds, a few stroppy girls who had been in the primary school 3: bottom form, girls who lived in social housing.

Deeply pernicious. And silly, there could easily have been a family of cousins spread between the three forms.

Accents (particularly outside the cities) are usually a marker of where people come from geographically, not where they are in a class structure. Because I grew up in England I have a weird halfway accent that sounds posh to some people and when I was working in a job that had a community development element was several times been tested by local politicians or industrialists or academics deliberately playing up their rural accents to see would I patronise or judge them. Fortunately I'm not quite that daft.

The protestant (female) GP who would prescribe the pill in our town as a 'cycle regulator' not as a contraceptive in the 1970s was viewed as slightly posh as well as a very nice person and good doctor.

In GB and other places with protestant clergy who could marry that was one access points into a perceived middle class, whereas our educated clergy and diocesan administrators were childless and didn't hand down any acquired status to the next generation. Very good overall levelling affect, as was having a rather small army.

Or even Great Britain?

It's the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

I heard a tale of a Cork Lady who said 'I hate the winter and having to spend so much time at the golf club because the other members might think we don't have a yacht'.
In almost 30 years of living fairly near the rcyc I have been in once. My boss who is 60 passes it every day but has never been in.