Peter Flanagan: Why are we so sensitive about the Irish accent?

IF YOU’RE IRISH and you live abroad, it’s only a matter of time until someone tries to do your accent.

It could be a saloon drunk, an office funnyman, or some dreaded acquaintance you’ve been trapped with at a party. We recognize them by the giddy look in their eye when they hear the lilt in our voice. Like a Hollywood starlet landing their big break. They’ve been waiting for this moment.

I live in constant fear of these people. The same way a rabbit must remain alert to the approach of the coyote. Their impersonation is invariably artless and there is no correct reaction. Laughter could encourage them to continue. But telling them off will make you seem oversensitive, or worse; ‘uppity’.

In my experience it’s best to remain completely still, holding one’s face in an unblinking rictus.

An excruciating moment will pass before the impressionist will become uncomfortable and move on, the humiliation now mutually experienced.

Irish people protect the authenticity of our accents as the Italians do with their food. Slight variations in the recipe are an abomination. A common mistake is to think that there is a ’broad’ Irish accent in the same way there is general American, general Australian, or Received Pronunciation (otherwise known as ‘the Queen’s English’).

Our voices change in almost imperceptible increments from county to county. The generalised, phony enunciations of Hollywood actors are the dialectical equivalent of the mass-produced red slop in a jar of Dolmio.

House of Guinness on Netflix is the latest major production to draw the nation’s ire for its bogus brogues and gratuitous Paddywackery. The crimes against Irish culture made by British and American filmmakers over the decades are too many to list here, but they have been painfully catalogued in our collective consciousness.

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We’re as harsh with each other as we are with outsiders. God forgive you if you speak with the nasal South Dublin vernacular. The rising intonation at the end of sentences makes statements sound rhetorical, like; ‘My father is a partner at KPMG?’ or ‘Get off my property?”

Your very Irishness will be called into question if you sound like this.

You’ll be a written off as a west Brit, a collaborator, someone who’d rather ape their former colonial masters than embrace the indigenous culture. It is the Judas Iscariot of dialects, a pathetic pinched whine that insists on derision.

The most challenging speech patterns come for the north of the island. The sound of people from the border counties could easily be confused with the strangulated squawking of exotic gulls on a remote crag. Cavan, Louth and Monaghan natives speak with a clipped delivery, high pitch and compressed airflow. This lends a breathless urgency to everything they say despite the fact that they clearly have nothing on.

Further north, the accent becomes even more distinctive, blended as it is with that of the lowland Scots who colonised the land in the 17th century. In rural Antrim and Down vowels shift like sand, with words like ‘house’ becoming ‘hoose’. Scottish influence was weaker in urban centers like Belfast, so they pronounce the same word as ‘hoyse’.

The restless cadences of the Northern Irish are incomprehensible to most international listeners. I’ve even heard English people describe it as ‘scary’, associating it as they do with the Troubles. They react to a Northern Irish accent as if they are communicating with a spirit through a Ouija board. The experience is at once exhilarating, confusing, and terrifying. What are they trying to say? Do they come in peace? Are they a goodie or a baddie?

This post-colonial context probably partially explains why we’re so sensitive about the way we speak. While the Irish language is having a moment right now, it is still largely on life support amongst the general population. But the peculiar rhythms to our voices remain an unbroken chain to the past. Forced to learn English under duress in a single generation, we adopted the foreign tongue imperfectly.

Grammatical nuances of the old world often persist in unusual and delightful ways. For example, there is no present perfect tense in Gaelige; instead the past and present get smushed together. So ‘I’ve just eaten’ becomes ‘I’m after eating’ (Tá mé tar éis ithe).

This is not the Queen’s English; it is Hiberno-English, and it is ours and ours alone.

Peter Flanagan is an Irish comedian and writer.

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