SOON after moving to Ireland I recognised that there was a different kind of Irish.
Different to those I’d grown up with. Different, in fact, to any kind of Irish person I’d ever come across.
Now part of that is the immigrant’s condition, because the immigrant conflates the country left in to some kind of perfect paradise.
That is the kind of mindset I was brought up in and, to be fair, childhood summers in Ireland did little to disabuse that notion.
It also creates a kind of unity that isn’t really there.
Distance allows a belief in a shared Irishness to flourish, a belief that being Irish is enough to unite people in a shared experience and outlook.
So I remember the shock of hearing someone tell me here, when I spoke of the old Irish communities in Britain, that they could all just come home if they wanted to.
I remember the shock of hearing such simplistic ignorance, as if emigration was simply a matter of travel tickets.
Learning later on that this Irishman was of my own age, owned a boat for messing about on the water and enjoyed flying planes with his pilot’s licence, didn’t just make me think rich boys and their toys are here in Ireland too.
It made me think that there really are different kinds of Irish. A few years later, at the height of the Celtic Tiger, I remember listening to a woman on the radio complain about the disappointment of her trip to Lapland and thinking, wow, there really are different Irish, aren’t there?
As she listed her petty complaints I remember wondering if the new Irish weren’t just about the silliest people I’d ever come across.
Well, to paraphrase Gerry Adams, they haven’t gone away, you know.
I was recently, for the first time in my life, on a transatlantic flight to North America.
All new, all very exciting. Shortly before arrival though I witnessed a display of behaviour that I can only describe as arrogant, spoilt and embarrassing.
A young Irishman, maybe late twenties, early thirties, decided to complain to one of the cabin crew that his wife’s in-flight movie hadn’t worked.
He did this in a deeply dismissive, patronising way, barely listening to anything the woman said in reply.
He topped it all by repeatedly saying it was unacceptable to the extent that my own children have since adopted it as a saying to mock each other’s displays of spoiled behaviour.
He did it too with such an air of entitlement that I really was quite taken aback.
My mind flicked back to the pilot boy and the Lapland woman.
These new Irish, I thought, they’re kind of mortifying, aren’t they?
During the summer I was talking to a friend of mine from Birmingham who was over visiting his Irish family.
We shared a very similar upbringing and we got to talking about the Irish we grew up with and also talked about how different a lot of the new Irish are.
We didn’t sentimentalise the old days of having very little, but we couldn’t help talking about the difference between the Irish we knew and the Irish now, the Irish of entitlement and privilege who flourished in the Celtic Tiger and who often sound like the spoilt poster children of Europe.
We couldn’t help, if I’m being honest, by mocking these Irish and wondering if they would ever cop themselves on.
I don’t know what kind of world you come from that leaves you unable to sympathise in any way with generations older than you who were forced to emigrate whilst you contemplate your next flying lesson.
I don’t know what kind of world you come from where you think you can go on national radio and complain at length about the failings of your trip to Lapland as if it were a human tragedy.
I don’t know what kind of world you live in if you think the failure of your in-flight movie is unacceptable.
I don’t know that world at all but to those of you in it I can only say, I feel sorry for you.
