IT'S amazing what you’ll find on YouTube. Among the guys urging you to buy a cloth that’ll make paintwork scratches on your car vanish, or what foods to eat if you want to live to be 135, there is a considerable number of items that delight and inform.
I found one such a couple of days ago: A panel discussion hosted by the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) asking the question: “Are Northerners welcome in the South?”
The three northerners on the panel were a doctor from Derry, a lawyer from Carrickfergus and a Green Senator from North Belfast. All three of them said they were made feel welcome, living and working in Dublin, but they added some interesting details.
The lawyer from Carrickfergus had married a Munster man and she had abandoned the stern unionism of her upbringing. She went from a school where no Irish was taught and where ‘God Save the Queen’ was sung twice a day, to becoming an ardent nationalist who embraced the Irish language she’d never been taught in school. Her four children have attended a Dublin Gaelscoil, putting her Irish to shame, she says happily.
The Derry doctor said she never thought of herself as moving to another country – she was Irish in Derry and she continues to be Irish in Dublin. The Senator from North Belfast seemed to have encountered more interest than hostility, although it was assumed he was a Sinn Féin member of the Seanad rather than a Green member.
One intriguing detail: The lawyer from Carrickfergus said that, early in her Dublin days, a colleague took her aside and told her she’d need to do something with her Carrickfergus accent: It grated on clients and it distracted their thinking. So – and this is the amazing part – she deliberately changed her Carrick accent to a middle-class Dublin one. It sounds natural and delightful, and she is full of praise for the colleague who made the suggestion.
For a united Ireland to be a success, Northerners need to be accepted in the South, and from this discussion they are – certainly if they’re middle class. What about the other way round? Southerners in the North?
Well, apart from my wife, I know few Southerners living up here, but my belief would be that – again with the middle-class caveat – they are accepted and their accents even admired.
People tend to hang on to their accent as a badge of pride, although the Carrick lawyer was happy to ditch hers. But it’s difficult to dispute that the northern accent has a roughness, an uncomfortable in-your-faceness that some people in the South read as aggression.
When a border poll is held and won – and it will be at some point – we should have prepared by learning to mix with each other, getting to know each other. As the panel said, there is a tendency for Southerners to regard Northerners as slightly weird, coming from a different and once-feared region. You’ll hear Northerners who buy into the rubbish about Southerners being cute hoors with beguiling accents; and similarly there are Southerners who don’t much like what sounds like Northern bluntness/rudeness.
I’d suggest that Micheál Martin, if he’s still around after the South’s general election, should organise a summer month (or better still, two) when not just children but adults, ideally whole communities North and South, should swap places and live among the ‘other’ side of Ireland for a few months. Of course it’d involve expense, but the A5, to take one example, is costing a lot too.
And if it taught us to respect and value our differences and rejoice in the heritage we have in common, it’d be money well spent.
