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.

let's face it, that's the point.

I was in college with someone a bit socially aspirational/ snobbish (son of a GP, so lower than most people on the rcyc pecking order) who was very chuffed to be given a chance to crew one of the boats for a race, and was horrified when the Fastnet disaster unfolded around him and he realised just how little the lives of the crews mattered to the owners and racers. Put him right off that particular path into the upper echelons.

The Fitzwilliam Tennis Club was the place that filled that niche in Dublin I think. Only nice members.

I had dinner in the Fitzwilliam a few years ago...my husband had been doing some work for a member who kindly invited us. I remarked that it was very busy for a Wednesday in October, with work the next day. The member advised me that the diners weren't the type of people who worried about getting up for work!

I assume Mount Carmel in Dublin was where Sorcha OCarroll Kelly gave birth before it ceased maternity care.

Now that Mt. Carmel is gone, the private maternity du jour is now the Merrion or Fitzwilliam wing in Holles Street. Take that Lindo Wing ha ha!

Dd has found class in NI different from London, though I suspect London can be different from elsewhere in England.

Class in London can be quite coded. Visible wealth (new car, jewellery etc) is often not a good idea. Everyone uses public transport. The value of your property often depends on how long you have owned it, rich people often have a modest London house and a large second home, and plenty, like us, are property rich, cash poor. Out of school activity tends to be organised so MC kids can ski, play the piano, take part in sport and are dragged to the theatre.

As a blown in key parts of the class code were not relevant. (School, where you live etc) and DD was probably judged on her elderly car and her lack of interest in clothes, or sunshine holidays. She observed the higher status accorded to someone with a affluent small businessman father and another whose mum was very senior in the public sector and who lived in Balmoral. Also in the mix was that so many of her colleagues seem to have known not only each other, but each other's families from nursery through University and so though friendly it was initially hard to break in.

She still reckons that she has it easier than a friend who comes from one of the more working class sectarian areas of the city, so is neither blown in nor has those existing, deeply embedded, social networks.

DD then bought a house which seemed to cause colleagues to rethink. Was she higher status than they had thought, failing to understand that Londoners stretch themselves to start paying a mortgage as soon as possible.

I went to a convent boarding school in the UK and I remember an Irish friend, from an affluent farming family, observing that the nice thing about Ireland was that everyone knew each other. In her circles they probably did.

A lot of us know a lot of us. Small population, not huge territory, big families, the church, the GAA, relatively few universities. It's usually quite easy and quick to establish links and find a mutual.

For my Belfast pal and her husband, trips south often involved them meeting people who knew people they knew through the Methodist church or through the extended Irish Italian ice cream and fish & chips empire.

?

bore the fuck off anyone with class aspersions, big thick heads on ye, those days of planting land are over, what an inane and offensive thread.

not a bit controversial. Again temporarily.

I think the infamous ‘KPMG girl’ summed up so much of what’s painful about the south county Dublin set. It’s so cliquey. The idea of being trapped in an ‘Orts’ course in UCD makes me shudder.

@Cigarettesandbooze now you do know that there is a rhotic and non-rhotic version of the English language. How very dare you recognise the aggression towards the letter R. Shame on you. That r whilst not pronounced should be part of everything. I didn't do Orts myself. But I don't wish to discuss this temporary situation any further.

Really fascinating thread. Late mother was Irish. She was from a large catholic farming family and born in the 40s. She was the biggest snob and had all sorts of notions! I remember being worried to bring friends home in case they weren’t the right sort of person. She’d not say anything to them but it would be clear. She would talk about mixing in the right sets etc…or a person being from a very good family. Most of the rest of the family (my generation) are normal though!

The fact NI has grammar schools means, I would guess, that there is less of the private school/ comprehensive divide there is in the mainland UK. (though there are some grammar schools in mainland)

If you consider yourself irish, there is no class system. It is very simple. And only an idiot who says anything different.

An idiot or a Traveller, or a person from Moyross applying for a job, or a girl in a town with an Ursuline convent and a Presentation convent, or a person confronted with an equally Irish friend who went to TCD and said in passing that university was just like school really, all the same people they knew from the tennis club (and later remarked that they didn't think they knew anyone who'd been to a Christian Brothers school).

It isn't like the British 'class system' with a landed aristocracy and an establishment propped up by schools, the military and the honours system, but there are lots of opportunities for petty snobbery, many of them mutually contradictory.

that is not a class system and you well know that, that is a chip on the shoulder.

I absolutely don't what to shut what you mean down, but all those fuckers are being called out this week and last, it is beyond belief and why the hell are names not turned out for them?

I doubt there's a country on earth without a class system. We may not have an aristocracy, but of course we have a class system.

that is not a class system and you well know that, that is a chip on the shoulder

I would appreciate your definitions of

1 a class system
2 a chip on the shoulder

because it sounds to me as if you don't understand what the first is and are a raging snob.

@mirrensidhe Calm down.

We like to think we don’t have a class system. But there clearly is social stratification - the ‘old money’ huge historic estate-owning people are usually “West Brits”, mostly educated in the UK, Eton etc. with clearly British accents, some with British titles eg Lord, Earl. As a PP said there is a perception though that they are not really Irish, though I would argue that many of them do identify as Irish. They would be perceived as ‘posh’.

Then there’s a layer of wealthy landowners/farmers who may be Protestant but embedded in their community. Traditionally they may have sent their kids to a Protestant boarding school in Ireland, (which also gave a distinct accent (more British sounding) but over the last 30 years, there is less of that (in my area at least) as they have a local secondary school now. They would have also been perceived as ‘posh’.

Then there is the rest of the wealthy people - I think in Dublin/cities it is more obvious - there are more private secondary schools, more division of areas. The rest of the country is much more mixed - most people go to their local primary schools so everyone mixes with everyone else, regardless of background. The local clubs are mixed.

Access to third-level education is pretty good - we have a very high level of school leavers going to university - I think nearly twice the number in the UK. This has meant that many traditionally working-class kids have been able to have careers that are very different to their parents. The snobbery around accessing certain careers is still there but decreasing I think.

Outside of the South Dublin bubble, the class system is a lot flatter in my experience. Most of us are only one generation from fairly humble backgrounds.

We have very few large estates. The Land Acts meant a change from 97% of small farmers being tenants in 1870 to 97% of small farmers being land owners in 1930. There has been concentration and consolidation since, but the situation is unlike that in GB.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Land_Commission
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Acts_(Ireland)

Christ but I hate the "West Brit" thing. I've been called a West Brit on here before, just because I'm from South County Dublin, went to private school and don't like GAA or trad.

My Irish passport and generations upon generations of Irish heritage (literally nothing else in the family tree) don't count apparently.

It's no better than Republicans in the US proclaiming that NY or California aren't the "Real America".

This is a fascinating thread for someone born in England whose mother was from Kilkenny and father’s family from Co Armagh (he spent his childhood shuttled between the north of England and Northern Ireland), still with close family in the RoI.
My mother was both charmed and bemused by the English class system. As an ex-nurse married to a doctor in the 1950s/60s all the women she interacted with were upper middle class English women from very different backgrounds to her essentially rural upper servant class upbringing.
I attended an English convent school, which also functioned as the local Catholic grammar school for girls, and the class hierarchies recognised by the nuns were: top, girls from old English, preferably aristocratic, Catholic families; next, the daughters of middle class professionals, both English and Irish; and third, girls from working-class Irish backgrounds, who were looked down on. Being a boarder in either of the top two classes gave you extra cachet. There was a similar class divide among the nuns themselves, with the domestic and manual work done by the Irish lay sisters.

Your not a west Brit purely for living in South County Dublin, your a Ross o'carrol Kelly type.

A west Brit is Protestant, "landed gentry" type, has a British accent and has likely been educated in the UK. They can be found all over Ireland not just within certain Dublin postcodes.