IS there really that much difference between the Irish and the English? And the differences that are there, are they getting smaller and smaller?
Of course we sound different and speak differently but it is the same language. Someone from Birmingham doesn’t sound any more like someone from Newcastle than they do someone from Mayo.
Not only that but with the rise and rise of social media some people even suggest that the distinct nature of accents is changing anyway and that a more generic speech pattern is now spreading across these islands.
Not so long ago, in fact, an older man here said to me of the young Irish people around him that they sounded completely different to the way young people in this part of Ireland used to sound. I don’t know how true that is but it does seem that if you want to hear a strong, deep accent that it is often an older person you’d need to listen to to hear it.
But, still, the Irish do sound different from the English, there is no denying that. Even then though many, many people like me are living examples of the fallacy of accent as a signifier of national identity.
And what beyond that? We watch the same television programmes, upload the same endless details of our lives on to Facebook, go abroad on the same sun holidays, support the same English football clubs.
We eat a lot of the same foods now, shop in the same main street/high street stores, drive around in the same cars, wear the same kind of clothes.
Irish weddings are still way better than English ones and Irish funerals even better still. But accents, weddings, funerals? Is that it? That sounds more like a weak film script than a strong division between nations.
Maybe it’s more that we used to be different. That 30 or 40 years ago Ireland and England were truly different countries and nationalities even to the extent that the Irish of my youth in England were visible sometimes by the kind of clothes they wore, never mind the way they spoke.
They had cultural signifiers that the English simply didn’t share and those great social clubs of the past really didn’t contain any English people and if they did they would not have known what to make of it at all.
This was long before, remember, Irish theme pubs and stag trips to Dublin. This was long before hordes of young Irish professionals looked very much like hordes of young English professionals. This was long before the time you couldn’t really tell an Irish selfie from an English one.
And maybe anyway it will be a good thing, a good thing that the Irish and the English are becoming more and more like each other. If the old hatreds and the old enmities are reduced, for instance, to played out expressions on a football pitch wouldn’t that be a million times better than the old hatreds and old enmities being played out with guns and bombs?
If the differences between the Irish and the English are left to be cynically marketed by, for instance, the likes of U2’s professional Irishness, wouldn’t that be better than two neighbouring nations forever distrusting each other and not really knowing each other?
Would it not be better too if people on both sides of the Irish Sea were able to forget about the artificial differences of nationality, differences so often exploited by those whose real service is to neither nation, and see when their interests were shared by the fact of their shared lives?
After all does not the low-waged, insecurely-employed Englishman have so much more in common with the low-waged, insecurely-employed Irishman than he ever does with the English banker or the English executive? Does not the Irishwoman seeking some stable accommodation for her kids to grow up in not have more in common with the Englishwoman seeking the same than she does with the Irish woman in the big house with the nanny and the au pair?
How in those cases is that even a shared Irishness or a shared Englishness?
Surely what differentiates us is far outweighed by what we share and essentially what we share is the same thing that we share with those poor souls drowning in the Mediterranean, the ones we should be welcoming in to our Irishness and our Englishness, putting a saving hand out to them and saying, come on board, we’re all in this together.
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