Minor complaints thread (39 Viewers)

[ann post]

I think I'd rather hang out with three of the four Corrs

Jim is just one person Seanc.

 

[egg_]

I still see mostly English newspapers at every newsagent, Sky on in every pub, stories about English politics on Irish news. Tell me what's happening in France and Germany, countries I'm in a goddamn union with. But they put this shit on cos we care what happens in England and we don't care what happens in France. Cos deep down, we identify with the English. We see ourselves in them.

Meh. I expect it's mostly cos of the shared language. It's not just the brits - last time I was at electric picnic all the not-top-of-the-bill comedians spent most of their time talking about US politics.

 

[ann post]

Meh. I expect it's mostly cos of the shared language. It's not just the brits - last time I was at electric picnic all the not-top-of-the-bill comedians spent most of their time talking about US politics.

If I went to your house and burned all your clothes and then made you buy my clothes and then started saying we had similar clothes, I don't know if you'd say we 'shared tastes'.

 

[Anthony]

The choir had a gig yesterday. They pulled out Christmas songs that I haven't practiced yet, and some I had never even heard before! Lots of frantic miming.

 

[Unicron]

For better or worse and without getting into the why's we are, linguistically, in the anglosphere (in this case I mean the countries who primarily speak English) and we're the smallest one (by a couple of hundred K). We hoover up cultural exports from all the big ones; not just the Brits, but especially the Americans, and the Australians. We probably short change good stuff that the Canadians, Kiwis and South Africans make. I think it's natural to have an affinity of some sort for the countries that we can easily understand. I worry about the cultural imperial creep of America more than I do the UK, which hasn't yet realised that it's possibly headed the same way as the nation state of Venice.

I also think there's an element to our fascination with the brits (the English?) where we grab popcorn and go "thank goodness we're not them." But we do also kinda need to know what's going on over there as they have a direct influence over what happens on part of the island and over people who consider themselves to be Irish.

If we were Francophone we'd probably watch more stuff from France, and bits of Belgium and Switzerland too.

And looping back to one of my hobby horses, if we were all writing these posts in Irish we'd probably be hoovering up English language shit still, plus the best French/German stuff depending on what our second or third languages were (my vision of an Irish speaking Ireland is one where we're like Scandinavians by necessity and we've shrugged off the comfort/laziness/ease/lack of curiosity of anglophonic people )

 

[Unicron]

I think I'd rather hang out with three of the four Corrs than with Mark E Smith, but that's for that other thread.

U2 and the Corrs are exports though, it's a different topic

A mate had a story about meeting Mark E Smith in Barcelona the morning after partying all night and not going to bed, he was pretty rough but he helped Smith buy cigarettes from a machine in a bar (I think you had to get a token to operate it to stop kids from just buying cigs) and Smith advised him to get himself an "equaliser," which was a concoction I don't remember the ingredients for, but it sounded like death in a glass.

 

[Deadmanposting]

Meh. I expect it's mostly cos of the shared language. It's not just the brits - last time I was at electric picnic all the not-top-of-the-bill comedians spent most of their time talking about US politics.

Just give me one radio story on RTE about the north for every one I get on the UK covid inquiry or Tory leadership back-and-forths or any other irrelevant bullshit happening over there

 

[Deadmanposting]

Down here I watched Munster play some french team, Leinster played some other french team, the provincial club GAA was big news. That golf lad who sold out to the Saudis was news. Them swimming lads. Went to two golf award things.

There was a big trad sesh as well.

And yes, the EPL was there in the background the whole time, but no more than a side note for anyone here. Everyone cared far more about two villages in Ulster and two villages in Munster than they did about the big soccerball clubs where I actually work. We're in Connaught.

Bad news for you

I'm moving to Connaught. Aka, the real Ireland.

I've a MICA redress scheme for you Make Ireland Connaught Again!

 

[Deadmanposting]

Sky News has always been really UK / US orientated and is a waste of time.
Only really Al Jazeera reports the WORLD news of the 24 news channels.

If you can get DW, France 24 or NHK, they are about a billion times better than Sky or BBC
You will almost never get coverage on the British royal family or the UK Tory party, I promise you

 

[Unicron]

It's pretty hard to untangle what Irish culture is beyond the obvious bits - music, dance, language, art, literature, education, sports- tweed and smallholding aren't really easy to fit into the modern world like the would have been. I'm probably missing a lot.

My skewed view on it is stuff that came with the celtic culture is a lot of what we identify with and what is considered british sits somewhere between the roman era and the anglo saxon stuff.

Friend of mine was talking about his observations of "Scottishness" on twitter last week and said that there does seem to be a very easy way for people there to feel Scottish and be comfortable with the identity but there's a hostility there in investment in the language and the restoration of it.

Which seems different to the very sincere efforts to bring it back in Wales, or even the attitude here which I perceive to be "it'd be nice if more of us could speak it and all efforts towards that are to be commended, oh well ... moving on."

But what I thought was more interesting was his point that we've all collectively decided we're gaels. We're an oft invaded or arrived upon island and in addition to the Celts/gaels we've had the Norse here, the Brits, the Normans, some Hugenots etc. But as a people we've mostly coalesced into one thing.

Like, my Ulster based family (which straddles the border) has a family tree going back to to the 1750's, there's a good chance that we came over with Cromwell (family lore, depending on the side of the border we're on is that we either came over as soldiers or were kicked out of England for stealing sheep, whatever is less shameful to yourself) so I'm hardly a true gael, but I don't feel anything but Irish and traditionally to feel Irish is to sort of buy into the tropes of what it is to be Irish, the gaelic stuff, I'm an atheist prod who culturally is probably quite catholic because for a long time to be Irish was to be catholic, they were interwoven. I imagine that I have plenty of relations who feel British, the Free-Peeers certainly do.

I do think it's interesting and exciting to see the imigration since the 90's and how that will impact the idea of Irishness, how the children of immigrants will hold the idea of being Irish as well as possibly whatever their parents are at the same time and how it is balanced, or if some will see themselves still as solely Polish or Nigerian etc. or even if some will reject or lose their heritage or identity to a sense of Irishness in the same way that some of the Irish who went to Britain did.*

* There's a story about Wayne Rooney being in school and his teacher telling him that with a name like Rooney he must be Irish.

Young Wayne went home and later on:

"Dad, are we Irish?"

"How the fucking hell should I know?"

 

[Deadmanposting]

Which seems different to the very sincere efforts to bring it back in Wales

Was staggered with how much Welsh I heard spoken when I was in Angelsea this year
Just people walking about

Mad jealous of them

 

[Unicron]

Was staggered with how much Welsh I heard spoken when I was in Angelsea this year
Just people walking about

Mad jealous of them

We were in Caernarfon last year for a night waiting to get the ferry back to Dublin the next morning. Was really taken with how much of a living language it was there. We were in a pub for dinner and drinks and the staff would deal with us and then when talking to each other just switch back into Welsh, thought it was very cool.

Compared to being in the Donegal gaelteacht this summer and I asked someone there who was giving us a tour but who was also a teacher how widely spoken it was by locals and was told "not very." Got chatting to a few other younger people who told us that they used to speak it to their grandparents but have lost it a bit since they passed away.

 

[nuke terrorist]

Was staggered with how much Welsh I heard spoken when I was in Angelsea this year
Just people walking about

Mad jealous of them

There has been a huge Welsh language music scene for decades.
Punk, indie, rap, plus many modern genres using their language that is thriving.
They have great fun with it and had had to fight hard to save Welsh before that.
A real success story.

Compare that to us -
"An wil cead agaim dul go dti an letris??" (sic).
The state's terrible guardianship of the Irish language ruined it for many.
Apart from trad genres there is fairly little music with Irish vocals.

 

[Deadmanposting]

Happy to blame the state to a point
But we have to accept some of this ourselves

We don't learn Irish, and we don't learn European languages to a level you might expect given our longstanding EU membership
There's a laziness factor here at some level.

 

[ann post]

The people who continued to speak irish largely were in traditionally poorer areas so youths would have been more likely to leave the gaeltacht in the routine reccessions / famine events.


Conversly

I was in a room full of people recently, all dubs born and bred and they all had great Irish.

 

[egg_]

Irish in (non-gaelscoil) schools is basically taught as a dead language, like Latin - it's all rote-learning pre-prepared translations. We feel obliged to preserve it as part of our cultural heritage, but really there's no practical value to actually speaking it, so this is compromise we've settled on

 

[seanc]

Ceapaim go mbeidh sé ceart go leor ar an nós, an geailge. Tà a làn teanga 's cultur 's rudaí mar sin insteach, í do chroí, í do ceann.

Not very good Irish, but it's there.

 

[nuke terrorist]

Happy to blame the state to a point
But we have to accept some of this ourselves

We don't learn Irish, and we don't learn European languages to a level you might expect given our longstanding EU membership
There's a laziness factor here at some level.

I am a pretty stupid and only manage one language.

I have records from at least 70 different UN countries and having no English vocals is par the course for me.

Got a boxed set by a band singing in Finnish today and last record I listened to was an Einsturzende Neubauten LP.

 

[JohnnyRaz]

The people who continued to speak irish largely were in traditionally poorer areas so youths would have been more likely to leave the gaeltacht in the routine reccessions / famine events.


Conversly

I was in a room full of people recently, all dubs born and bred and they all had great Irish.

I’ve read a few theories that language revivals tended to be more successful in countries where a wider section of society (ie not just the poorest/most isolated) still spoke the language (ie wales, Catalonia) and where it was a clear badge of difference in the context of a multinational/multicultural kingdom/state etc.
the popular enthusiasm for Irish dwindled after independence in the free state/republic, while Irish continued to grow in the north in 50s-90s etc.

Also my own gut sense is our inability to speak other languages well comes from the Anglosphere effect, plus the focus on teaching Irish (badly) to the exclusion of other languages at primary level for the past 100 years

 

[Cormcolash]

Point is that we're very softened to the English and their ways.

Yuval Harari reckons culture is the story we tell each other.
Every single day, we choose the stories the English tell themselves about themselves.
A lot of Ireland shops in English shops, follows English football teams, doggedly follow English politics, watch English TV stations, English TV shows, read English newspapers, watch English news, go to see English comedians, hear English voices on Irish radio advertisements and and all the rest of it. I mean it's almost neverending.
A lot of our choice of culture is that of a foreign country, a foreign culture.
Ireland is choosing every day to be more English. Like a dog that thinks it's people.

We'll jump down someone foreign's throat for asking if Ireland is in the UK, but culturally, we are desperately so.
We don't make the distinction ourselves in our daily lives.
To the point where Belfast seems more exotic to Dubs than London.

And all the while the English fuck us over hard on Brexit, the Legacy bill and could not give two single fucks about us in the micro or the macro.

I think it's hilarious that we have this glaring national blindspot about how very very English the country has become and it's almost never talked about.

I mean on the plus side, it might give the Unionists a little more comfort on a United Ireland, but fuck me, was it for this?

TL;DR Innit?

Irish politics and governance for the most part consists of:

Watch what the Brits are doing
See how did that thing the Brits did went
5 years later, let's do that thing the Brits have done.