K Notice boxes in newspapers are a nice thing. You learn about problems that you didn’t even know existed. Recently, for example, a worried mother turned to the English one Daily Telegraphbecause she feared her teenage son was becoming “Irish.”
The mother is half Irish, so the teenager is in a risk group who may experience suspicious symptoms. He now uses the Irish version of his name and is critical of “the British,” which infuriates his English father, his mother reported. The son hopes to be able to study in Ireland. That’s why he read books about Irish history, literature and music and even learned Irish, she complained.
Frank McNally from the Irish Times explained that immigrants outperform natives in many aspects of “Irishness.” “Irish dance is dominated by Americans, German and Dutch visitors often have a deeper feeling for the country than we who were born here,” he wrote. “Japanese tourists are known for quickly learning our notoriously difficult native language while playing fiddle and bagpipes in the pub after class.”
On the other hand, Irish people who have an English accent can have problems in Ireland. The author Morag Prunty, who writes under the pseudonym Kate Kerrigan and grew up in north-west London, has Irish parents and has always felt thoroughly Irish. But when she moved to Ireland in 1991, the locals made fun of her because of her accent. “It’s hurtful to love a country so much and then have the people you want to like you tell you that you don’t belong.”
That serves her right – why was she born in London? Conversely, people with Irish accents are also mocked in England. Although English is predominantly spoken in both countries, there are many difficulties in communication. There are countless different dialects in both countries, but to each other’s ears they all sound the same – English or Irish. I can confirm that. I was thrown out of a pub in England in 1993 because the Irish Republican Army (IRA) had recently detonated a truck bomb in the London financial center.
But you can also get into trouble with an Irish accent in Ireland. A long time ago in the Gaeltacht in the west of Ireland, where Irish is the common language, I ordered a beer in the pub and was teased by the local youth as a “fine English-speaking gentleman”. Justifying myself that I was from Berlin and had just taken an Irish course at Queen’s University Belfast, I enjoyed free beer for the rest of the evening.