What ethnicity do British and Irish people resemble most? (price, litigation)
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Are some people trying to miss the point? Ethnicity is a tenuous concept at best. An artificial construct to make people believe they are more interesting. Take the UK and the US. Irish heritage is celebrated as if people have some ancient link to the greatest civilization that ever existed. If the lies... sorry census statistics are to be believed then Ireland must have had a population of around 100 million at some point. There is no doubt that Americans over emphasize their Irish, Scottish, Italian roots while playing down their English/German roots. I've met people who are 1/8th Irish that talk as if they personally survived the potato famine.
LOL! That's hilarious! Maybe people of Irish heritage in the US celebrate it because in England, it's not something to celebrate. Can you imagine England having a national holiday for the Irish? Plus, they've overcome a lot. In the colonies, the Irish used to be slaves, before color-coded slavery was invented. Even now in Canada and New England, some Irish are still servants. Maybe the celebrating is to compensate for a painful history and to acknowledge progress.
This is very True about the Irish & Italians in North East America, why is that?
Your also right about people who are only 1/8th Irish that act like they just got off the boat from Ireland.
Do they? Really? Strange, because I don't remember John Barnes (born in Jamaica) having much of a plummy British accent. Nor Lennox Lewis and nor greg Rusedski but for some strange reason they were all embraced under the banner of 'British' especially when they were winning or challenging for major sporting honours.
Linford Christie too, born in Jamaica wasn't shunned on grounds of tenuosity when he was bagging gold medals for team GB so lets get off the high horse because this thing people have about the Irish just reeks of condescending, sneering but typical double standards.
There are plenty of Brits on the Costa Del Sol who have never set foot in Britain but wave the Union Flag with all the tenacity of a matador on methamphetamine. For some reason these people always seem to escape the prejudice and boorish, snivelling jeers of derision. Why?
If someone looks Chnese or Asian no-one questions their right to a mixed identity but for the Irish it has become something of a repetetive and tedious slur to berate even the mildest references to a "proud of my irish background" token of recognition for finger pointing Brits who can't seem to grasp the fact that their own purer than thou 'Germanic-Celtic-Anglo-Saxon-Nordic-Norman-German-Jewish-Irish-Asian-Indian-Chinese-Bangladesh-Arabian-You-Name-It' lineage is nothing but mythology anyway.
Britain always seems to somehow manage in the midst of Jubilees, football tournaments, Olympics or rallying cries of middle-Eastern wars to whittle everything about Britain down to the tabloid repatriation frequent reiteration of the subjective grandeur of a few misleading quotes from Shakespeare's Henry V:- "Once more unto the breach dear friends, once more" suggesting some kind of whimsical pledge of nation and duty in a play reflecting an era where no such allegiance really existed as we know it today.
In fact that period of history as well as the play has been taken out of context as to make the actual content of history itself redundant much like how Maggie's stirring Falklands speeches have eerily lost in the fog of war the memory of her repugnant disdain of the Falklands Islands pre-war and the integral alliance with the fascists of Argentina as well as the arms sales late 70's.
So much that is fed to modern Britain as history is claptrap. So no wonder an oppressive perception of identity is hastily forced upon us whether we like it or not. the revisionists are the ones who get to re-write history after all. I mean, does anyone truly believe that there was somehow an established British identity as recognisable as that that reverberates through the revisionist depictions today that tallies with the brash Royal honour and bloodlust glorifying pomp that Henry V has come to be misleadingly representative of during that period of history? Reading the original text there all kinds of interactions and ties between France and Britain and the two nations were nowhere near as indistinguishable as they are portrayed in boorish tabloid furore in hindisght.
And what is the Britsih media's obsession with Waterloo and Agincourt? You don't hear French comedians banging on about William The Conqueror or the Britsih army's embarrasing exit in Basra yet there is still this yearning desire for some kind of utopian, breast beating context that makes British identity constant in an era where it could never be so ethnically mixed and redundant as a fading parody of yore. Probably why so many still cling to the banile bastion of mythology in the Queen.
Ireland (for the most part) is busy moving on from its past whilst some sections of British society don't really know how to come to terms with the present. When it's convenient they ridicule the Irish but as for North East America where are all these 1/8 irish ancestry Yankees who spend all their days Irish dancing and singing "Top a da mornin ta ye" in fine Irish brogues?
The Irish are about the most fully immersed nationality from Europe there is in America apart from the Germans. All the traditional working-class Irish neighbourhoods in Boston and New York have been gentrified. The only really Irish enclaves left in New York are fresh off the boat immigrant hubs such as Sunnyside, Woodside in Queens and Woodlawn in the Bronx. Most Irish New Yorkers are far more immersed into the fabric of American society than other nationalitis such as the Italians, Jewish, Puerto Ricans, Russian. Chinese, Indian communities et al at all so why all the festering vitriol? END OF PART 1
Last edited by Fear&Whiskey; 08-27-2012 at 04:48 PM..
Just because some may decide to swig a pint of Guiness now and again or join in once a year in a St.Patrick's Day parade to raise toast to a part of their history is hardly anything that seems offensive to me. Why the constant and intensive focus on 'plastic paddies'. It baffles me especially when you take into consideration the amount of 'plastic Brits' that have achieved heralded status and even knighthoods in the UK.
In many ways the UK has embraced multi-culturalism but at the same time it also likes to romanticise the presumptious notion that all inhabitants of the British Isles no matter where they've come from or how they've come to be a citizen of the UK have come to accept some kind of pre-requisite pantomime notion of Queenie and country when in fact identity for most people is something that can only be defined by themselves as individuals.
The notion that deference to Queen and country is the only thing that unites people in 'Albion' is also a much trumpeted, vaunted myth that has no semblance of tangible substance in reality. The only reason people can't congregate in fields or streets for any other reason is because Kenneth Clarke (the nice Tory) outlawed such congregations with draconian legislation to combat the 'evil scourge' of young people having fun for free in the fields of middle-England that belonged to some Earl of Arsehire in the 90's.
Very selective memory the British you know, especially the dinosaur middle-England garden gnome variety of the species. And yeah, I am sorry I started this rant now but as that old Irish saying goes "What will be will be". And we all know Shakespeare was an Irishman. I read it in a daily tabloid so it must be true.
Last edited by Fear&Whiskey; 08-27-2012 at 04:50 PM..
LOL! That's hilarious! Maybe people of Irish heritage in the US celebrate it because in England, it's not something to celebrate. Can you imagine England having a national holiday for the Irish? Plus, they've overcome a lot. In the colonies, the Irish used to be slaves, before color-coded slavery was invented. Even now in Canada and New England, some Irish are still servants. Maybe the celebrating is to compensate for a painful history and to acknowledge progress.
England DOES celebrate St Patricks day. St Patricks day in England is massive - you dont have to be Irish either. My kids school used to make everyone dress in green. Basically the English like the rest of our fellow Brits dont need an excuse to celebrate! We'll celebrate with anyone...Burns night for example - bring it on. Frankly we would turn up to the opening of a bottle of wine. Bizzarely St Patricks day is bigger than St Georges day which I never really understood.
England DOES celebrate St Patricks day. St Patricks day in England is massive - you dont have to be Irish either. My kids school used to make everyone dress in green. Basically the English like the rest of our fellow Brits dont need an excuse to celebrate! We'll celebrate with anyone...Burns night for example - bring it on. Frankly we would turn up to the opening of a bottle of wine. Bizzarely St Patricks day is bigger than St Georges day which I never really understood.
Therein lies the hypocrisy. Irish-Americans are constantly lambasted by Brits for their cartoon green "Top of da mornin ta ye" leprechaun sprite in their green St.Patrick's Day parade Jockstraps and blazers as they stride along the St.Patrick's Day festivities with their pint of green Guiness swirling and spilling upon the streets and yet.......
The irony is St.Patrick's Day is TEN TIMES the event (AT LEAST) St.George's Day is in Britain's major cities. "Do as I say, not as I do", a fitting epilogue for the dinosaur, clinging to a past that never existed in the first place middle-England foghorns who will probably just trumpet the tired refrain "We're just very British you know and we don't do that kind of thing old boy" in one of those plummy upper-class accents that you only hear in black and white movies from the 1940's and RAF museums.
Last edited by Fear&Whiskey; 08-28-2012 at 04:55 AM..
Therein lies the hypocrisy. Irish-Americans are constantly lambasted by Brits for their cartoon green "Top of da mornin ta ye" leprechaun sprite in their green St.Patrick's Day parade Jockstraps and blazers as they stride along the St.Patrick's Day with their pint of green Guiness swirling and spilling upon the streets and yet.......
Strange.... I wasn't aware that "Irish-Americans are constantly lambasted by Brits for their cartoon green "Top of da mornin ta ye" leprechaun sprite in their green St.Patrick's Day parade Jockstraps and blazers as they stride along the St.Patrick's Day with their pint of green Guiness swirling and spilling upon the streets" by myself nor anyone I know. How very odd, you would have thought i'd have noticed.
I've heard and made the odd comment here and there over the years but that was about the fact that it's celebrated here in the UK so fervently by people that couldn't point at Dublin on a map. Why on earth would people in the UK "constantly lambast" Irish-Americans for celebrating something that we celebrate too?
Last edited by Baldrick; 08-28-2012 at 06:08 AM..
Reason: The Devil made me do it.. but God said it was ok by him..
Therein lies the hypocrisy. Irish-Americans are constantly lambasted by Brits for their cartoon green "Top of da mornin ta ye" leprechaun sprite in their green St.Patrick's Day parade Jockstraps and blazers as they stride along the St.Patrick's Day festivities with their pint of green Guiness swirling and spilling upon the streets and yet.......
The irony is St.Patrick's Day is TEN TIMES the event (AT LEAST) St.George's Day is in Britain's major cities. "Do as I say, not as I do", a fitting epilogue for the dinosaur, clinging to a past that never existed in the first place middle-England foghorns who will probably just trumpet the tired refrain "We're just very British you know and we don't do that kind of thing old boy" in one of those plummy upper-class accents that you only hear in black and white movies from the 1940's and RAF museums.
Baldrick I was just about to say the exact same thing. Never in my life have I ever heard any Brit 'lambasting' any Irish-American for celebrating St Patricks in the exact same way we do? Who are these 'middle England foghorns' of whom you speak? I'm from Liverpool and have an accent about as far removed from the one you describe as its probably possible to be. Liverpool has the highest proportion of residents with Irish ancestry of any English city (probably a much higher proportion than any American city) hence grew up knowing lots of people with Irish heritage and simply celebrated along with my friends. Simple as that. Where have you heard this 'tired refrain': "We're just very British you know and we don't do that kind of thing old boy". Even if this were the case, this sentence contradicts the sentence prior to it. Either you have been mixing with some very odd people or you are living some imaginary 1940's life yourself. One of the strangest posts I have ever read on C-D.
Baldrick I was just about to say the exact same thing. Never in my life have I ever heard any Brit 'lambasting' any Irish-American for celebrating St Patricks in the exact same way we do? Who are these 'middle England foghorns' of whom you speak? I'm from Liverpool and have an accent about as far removed from the one you describe as its probably possible to be. Liverpool has the highest proportion of residents with Irish ancestry of any English city (probably a much higher proportion than any American city) hence grew up knowing lots of people with Irish heritage and simply celebrated along with my friends. Simple as that. Where have you heard this 'tired refrain': "We're just very British you know and we don't do that kind of thing old boy". Even if this were the case, this sentence contradicts the sentence prior to it. Either you have been mixing with some very odd people or you are living some imaginary 1940's life yourself. One of the strangest posts I have ever read on C-D.
No, only from about four different posters on this very thread. Ooooh. How peculiar.
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Take the UK and the US. Irish heritage is celebrated as if people have some ancient link to the greatest civilization that ever existed.
Ignorance
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If the lies... sorry census statistics are to be believed then Ireland must have had a population of around 100 million at some point. There is no doubt that Americans over emphasize their Irish, Scottish, Italian roots while playing down their English/German roots. I've met people who are 1/8th Irish that talk as if they personally survived the potato famine.
Is
Quote:
No Its Irish. When we went to southern florida we couldn't walk 5 feet without seeing some weirdo coming up and saying "oh ma gad are you from Ireland? Ma gggggggg granny is from there".
Bliss
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This is very True about the Irish & Italians in North East America, why is that?
Your also right about people who are only 1/8th Irish that act like they just got off the boat from Ireland.
And from the aforementioned and inevitably apt Baldrick himself "I've heard and made the odd comment here and there over the years but that was about the fact that it's celebrated here in the UK so fervently by people that couldn't point at Dublin on a map".
Nothing like the "Some of my best friends are Irish" defence to prove you have no prejudice. KentMum you spring to defence of Baldrick saying you've never heard another Brit lambasting the Irish and after reading a tame litigation in confession from the very same poster.
I rest my case.
Last edited by Fear&Whiskey; 08-28-2012 at 06:28 AM..
And from the aforementioned and inevitably apt Baldrick himself "I've heard and made the odd comment here and there over the years but that was about the fact that it's celebrated here in the UK so fervently by people that couldn't point at Dublin on a map".
Nothing like the "Some of my best friends are Irish" defence to prove you have no prejudice. KentMum you spring to defence of Baldrick saying you've never heard another Brit lambasting the Irish and after reading a tame litigation in confession from the very same poster.
I rest my case.
Pardon?
"Nothing like the "Some of my best friends are Irish" defence to prove you have no prejudice". I have no idea what your talking about. Some of my best friends aren't Irish. However my wife and children are but I don't see the relevance..
"Nothing like the "Some of my best friends are Irish" defence to prove you have no prejudice". I have no idea what your talking about. Some of my best friends aren't Irish. However my wife and children are but I don't see the relevance..
Then why do you care how St.Patrick's Day is celebrated or by whom? Do you take offence to the fact that many people at last week-end's Notting Hill Carnival couldn't point to the Carribean on the map? If not, why not? Why is this special distaste reserved for those who partake in celebrating St.Patrick's Day? Please elaborate....
As for prejudice perhaps prejudice was the wrong word but condescending snobbery of the highest order most certainly.
Last edited by Fear&Whiskey; 08-28-2012 at 07:00 AM..
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) outlawed such congregations with draconian legislation to combat the 'evil scourge' of young people having fun for free in the fields of middle-England that belonged to some Earl of Arsehire in the 90's.
. And yeah, I am sorry I started this rant now but as that old Irish saying goes "What will be will be". And we all know Shakespeare was an Irishman
. I read it in a daily tabloid so it must be true
.
" in one of those plummy upper-class accents that you only hear in black and white movies from the 1940's and RAF museums.
. How peculiar
.
. KentMum you spring to defence of Baldrick saying you've never heard another Brit lambasting the Irish and after reading a tame litigation in confession from the very same poster. 