We’re already obsessed with the British, so sometimes we should be a little more like them

Frank Coughlan

Daniel Day-Lewis is the quintessential Englishman, but that hasn't stopped us from claiming him as our own. Photo: Rabbani and Solimene Photography/Getty Images

January 31 2023 02:30 AM

We’re a touchy bunch in Ireland. So thin skinned, it’s a wonder we don’t cut ourselves shaving every morning. Not just about the big existentialist issues around our history (sure, no other nation ever suffered as much), but the simple trivia of everyday life.

Our antennae are so attuned to a sense of genetic grievance that even a really uplifting story about bagging a record number of Oscar nominations couldn’t be enjoyed without the perpetually offended tearing off their shirts to reveal their open wounds.

It’s dem Brits, of course. Never not at it. Claiming Paul Mescal, Colin Farrell and Barry Keoghan as their own. As if 800 years of stealing our land, language and religion wasn’t enough. Now they insist on muscling in on our night out in Hollywood.

Not that this cultural appropriation isn’t a tad irritating. Mostly, though, it’s simply sloppy journalism. Badness doesn’t come into it. Combined with that very English thing – even among their most enlightened – of not ever knowing what to make of us.

While we, on this smaller island of the archipelago, are never less than obsessed with our neighbours, they never give us a first thought let alone a second one.

We follow their football teams with the sort of devotion once ascribed to the Legion of Mary, loyally couch-surf their soaps and seem to know more about Brexit than those who voted for it.

They, on the other hand, only know us as that blob on television weather maps where the rain comes from, with Oxbridge types vaguely aware that the northern bit still belongs to them. Kind of.

Throw in cheap stag weekends, Oirish pubs and Roy Keane and you’d just about exhaust their archived knowledge.

This is their loss, of course. Understanding us a bit better would go no small way in unpuzzling themselves. But history is littered with big powers – even after a period of post-imperial reflection – neglecting to come to terms with their swashbuckling pasts.

Not that we are beyond this sort of casual cultural appropriation ourselves. We claim Daniel Day-Lewis as our own, when there was hardly a man born more quintessentially English than he.

John le Carre, who, in a post-Brexit huff, sought Irish citizenship, was immediately appropriated as a true son of the soil, as was Hilary Mantel. Both these giants of the English literary canon were, in truth, about as Irish as Stilton cheese.

There is a long list of pop icons – from Dusty Springfield to Ed Sheeran – who have been swaddled in the tricolour because of Irish connections. As if where they were born and grew up was simply a geographical accident.

We hardly need reminding that virtually all the Republic’s success in the era of Big Jack was achieved by claiming talented Sassenachs as our own. The English take this sort of thing in their stride. If they notice at all. In this respect at least, we should be more like dem Brits.