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Ireland; the centenary of Partition

Confoederatio Helvetica is a fudge, so that neither the German* or French speakers would be seen to have the upper hand. Latin, as a dead language, is great for these things. (This is also why Swiss cars carry "CH" stickers, and Swiss website addresses end in .ch)

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* yeah, it's not really German, it's just written with words from German. I never understood the idea of a "diglossic" language until I visited Zurich. Everyone was happy to speak to me in high German (although my Irish-Bavarian hybrid accent threw them, and they thought maybe I was Dutch), but what they spoke to each other was very odd... and I'd learned my German in Munich!

(On the other hand, even with my basic, school French I was able to get by in Geneva. They. Just. Speak. So. Slowly. It's. Great.)

Mike Reed said:
Surprise here, as 'Eire' appears on Irish stamps; also on some atlases whereas Ireland is the whole island. Very confusing, this. I take your point on 'Erse' being historic, but i thought 'Eire was, at lease formally, the country of Southern Ireland.
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Éire is the name of the country in Irish, its official first language, so that is what's used on coins and stamps. However, the name of the country in English is "Ireland", as Article 4 of the Constitution of states: "The name of the State is Éire, or in the English language, Ireland" (source: Irish Statute Book)

Now, the reason some Irish people get a little uppity about the use of the name "Éire" in English is that "Éire" was also previously used in English to describe the Irish Free State, a pre-1939 entity defined by the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty which, crucially, was not a fully independent nation, but rather a Crown dependency. (Irish Independence wasn't a one-shot event, but rather a series of withdrawals. If you've ever tried to end a phone call with an Irish person, this would not be a surprise)

Some people take the use of the older name as an assumption that Ireland is still not independent of the UK. I think those people need to cop on a little and remove the chip from their shoulder. I'm a little more pragmatic, and I see it as a genuine intention by English people to be courteous by using the native name of the country, unaware of the layered meanings and potential implied slights of that name. I try to correct as politely as possible and move on. After all, if someone is genuinely trying to be an arsehole, they'll try again; if they're not, then drawing attention to an innocent error makes me the arsehole.

In fairness, this is a really easy trap to walk into: if I jokingly refer to the homeland of my Finnish friend as "Suomi", she's not going to get the hump with me over it - quite the opposite in fact; so I can understand the confusion around "Éire".
 
KrisW said:
I'd learned my German in Munich!
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But they speak Bairisch in Munching, not German! (Fortunately they also speak German, otherwise we who roll up for oral proceedings at the European Patent Office would have all sorts of problems). From memory, there is only one area of Germany where Hochdeutsch is the everyday language - one of my colleagues comes from Bielefeld, and she speaks it - cut-glass tones, no gutturalness at all. Of course, it's an artificial creation of one Martin Luther, who wanted to translate the Bible into the language of the people. But there wasn't one, so he simply invented one. It's the reason why Luther is such an enormous cultural figure in Germany, not just a religious figure. The rest of us have hated him for it ever since!
 
Ruairi said:
https://sluggerotoole.com/2021/04/0...wSIQ7Cvv1A5EQiEGItMjTVc2VIDGhWvfGZpmwRRIkNfp4
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That is indeed very good. Essentially, the mess that is Northern Ireland is the outcome of the accumulation of several hundred years of mistakes and blindness (accidental and deliberate), and now everyone involved is desperately trying to avoid having to grasp the nettle to fix them. Ultimately, so long as the parties involved - all of them - refuse to face reality, the mess will continue, and ordinary, everyday people in Northern Ireland, who would just like to live a normal life, will continue to be disadvantaged.
 
KrisW said:
Everyone was happy to speak to me in high German (although my Irish-Bavarian hybrid accent threw them, and they thought maybe I was Dutch), but what they spoke to each other was very odd... and I'd learned my German in Munich!

(On the other hand, even with my basic, school French I was able to get by in Geneva. They. Just. Speak. So. Slowly. It's. Great.)
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KrisW said:
jokingly refer to the homeland of my Finnish friend as "Suomi", she's not going to get the hump with me over it - quite the opposite in fact; so I can understand the confusion around "Éire".
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Thank you Kris; very informative and interesting, though I know that 'Swiss German' is a bit like Geordie to southerners here. However, I'm surprise it resembles 'high German' (cf. the Queen's English?). Quite amusing comparison between Eire and Suomi, too, i.r.o. acceptance. Just happens the both my mother's and my favourite composer is Jean Sibelius.

During a private lesson at my house in the late nineties with a Finnish businessman, he tried to get me to pronounce Sibelius' first name (which, I believe, was adopted from French). I think I failed but it sounded like that south-eastern Spanish city, Jaen, from memory.
 
Sibelius’ native language was Swedish, but he always pronounced his name the French way, complete with nasal sound. It shouldn’t sound anything like Jaén.
 
Mike Reed said:
Thank you Kris; very informative and interesting, though I know that 'Swiss German' is a bit like Geordie to southerners here.
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No, it's not, it's virtually another language. One German teacher we had in Sandoz also taught the young apprentices in what was then the SAZM (Sandoz-Ausbildungszentrum Muttenz) and she would voice their complaints to the effect that it was sooooo hard for them having to communicate in a foreign language - that foreign language was Hochdeutsch!

Indeed, some Swiss dialects are so extreme that other Swiss find them almost impossible to understand. The classic example is Walliserdytsch, spoken in canton Wallis (Valais) - The French-"German" linguistic dividing line is approximately the town of Sierre/Siders, east of canton capital Sion. When I heard that our elder daughter had a class in her Masters Biology course in Basel that included a couple of Walliser girls, I asked, "Could you understand them?" "Eventually!" was her reply - but mentioned that, when they really didn't want to be understood, they could make it so.
 
That's possible in English too. The part of Cork where my in-laws are from, right along the Cork-Kerry border, has what I think is one of the least intelligible English accents on these islands. (See how you go with this sample: (YouTube video) .. I promise that every single word spoken here is English, not Irish).

tones said:
But they speak Bairisch in Munching, not German!
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Yes, some Germans have said that to me, and even the "German" is strange to Northerners. To me, it was the only German I'd ever heard, so I was fine, but my fellow students who'd actually learned the language beforehand were entirely lost at sea. Much later, a friend commented that I had done the equivalent of going to Glasgow to learn English (She'd know, as she did precisely that), which is a good comparison, I think.

tones said:
- one of my colleagues comes from Bielefeld
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yeah, so she claims ... ;) (Bielefeld conspiracy - Wikipedia)
 
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People don't really speak Boarisch in Minga anymore, unless they are trying to cultivate an air of the old-school traditional Bavarian farmer.

We are well known as snobs, so speak a high-german form of the language, as befits our superiority.

A few years back, our new head of department was an austrian, who do speak with a similar dialect. Overnight, all the managers in our department started laying on the bayerisch accent. WTF ?
 
KrisW said:
That's possible in English too. The part of Cork where my in-laws are from, right along the Cork-Kerry border, has what I think is one of the least intelligible English accents on these islands.
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Sorry, can't persuade that to play, but I know of the like.

You've probably seen the excellent The Siege of Jadotville, where Commandant Pat Quinlan is played by Jamie Dornan. Quinlan's son said that Dornan had played his father very well, except for the accent - but then, he added, his father's Kerry accent was so thick that they'd have had to subtitle it!

yeah, so she claims ... ;) (Bielefeld conspiracy - Wikipedia)
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So the Dam Busters wasted their time and Barnes Wallis's ingenuity?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Slam_(bomb)

The idea was not to hit the viaduct (very hard) but liquefy the soil around the foundations, so that it would collapse. It worked. Perhaps the town went with it?
 
tones said:
Sorry, can't persuade that to play, but I know of the like.

You've probably seen the excellent The Siege of Jadotville, where Commandant Pat Quinlan is played by Jamie Dornan. Quinlan's son said that Dornan had played his father very well, except for the accent - but then, he added, his father's Kerry accent was so thick that they'd have had to subtitle it!



So the Dam Busters wasted their time and Barnes Wallis's ingenuity?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Slam_(bomb)
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My brother had a pen friend from Bielefeld, many, many years ago. She was very sweet but a little slow on some things. She spent a few weeks at our place at Easter and she’d never seen a leg of lamb before. We convinced her it was ostrich, and there was no way she was going to touch it after that (no way she was going to eat Strauss).
 
tones said:
The latest Economist puts it perfectly:

The Unionists have damaged their cause more in five years than the nationalists have in 50

https://www.economist.com/britain/2021/04/15/northern-irelands-unhappy-centenary

They really are peculiarly clueless - I mean, anyone who somehow believes that Boris Johnson will not sell you down the river without the slightest hesitation... as they say in Belfast, right eejits.
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I remember at the time of the Brexit referendum discussing the DUP's position with workmates, and none of us could understand what was in it for them. Their 'heartland' support consists of a lot of farmers, most of whom have done pretty well out of the EU. It's only since the referendum, and taking note of their tactics, that I have deduced the only plausible explanation for their consistent support for Brexit is that they wanted a hard border between NI & RoI, calculating that no UK government would countenance the alternative.
 
^The DUP position has been hard to read, probably because the cards in their hands have changed so much over the years. Before the Brexit vote, the DUP was not very relevant and pushing for Leave was just a bit of harmless fun, as few thought Leave would win. After the result they had to guard against that "border down the Irish Sea". Then, after May's disastrous GE, they suddenly had a lot of clout in Westminster. But they didn't use it wisely. Then May was gone and BoJo threw them under the red bus.

Once the UK government's red line of leaving the EU CU was set, there was no ideal outcome for the DUP. But there would still be a way for the DUP to benefit. Northern Ireland is potentially in a pretty favourable position, straddling both the UK and the EU customs unions, at the cost of some bureaucratic inconvenience in Irish Sea ports. Instead of trying to re-negotiate the NIP, the DUP would have to put some of its ideological reflexes on the back burner and lobby hard, both in Westminster and in Dublin, to use this windfall to engineer some new and much needed investment.
 
GaryT said:
I remember at the time of the Brexit referendum discussing the DUP's position with workmates, and none of us could understand what was in it for them. Their 'heartland' support consists of a lot of farmers, most of whom have done pretty well out of the EU. It's only since the referendum, and taking note of their tactics, that I have deduced the only plausible explanation for their consistent support for Brexit is that they wanted a hard border between NI & RoI, calculating that no UK government would countenance the alternative.
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I think you're being undeservedly charitable to them, Gary, in applying the word "tactics", which implies reasoned thought, something of which I don't think they're capable. To me, it's the old tribal knee-jerk reaction against that other lot down South, with whom we want nothing to do. Remember how Arlene Foster has said that she'd leave Ireland, were it ever to be reunited, and go and live in the UK. This is something that a Northern Prod such as myself finds baffling. Anyone with half a brain must know that Westminster would drop Norn Iron like a hot potato tomorrow, if it could. The only thing stopping Boris is that he doesn't want to go down in history as the man who lost the United Kingdom.
 
For anyone interested...

https://www.qub.ac.uk/talks-100/

It looks very promising.

P.S. Listened to the first one by Professor Lord Bew. Really interesting stuff. The most interesting insight is that both Nationalists and Unionists expected Northern Ireland to fail, because the place clearly couldn't pay for itself. Yet, 100 years later, that non-paying entity is still with us.

His comments about Catholics being tossed out of the shipyard reminded me of my bitterly Protestant grandmother, who said, somewhat gleefully, that the notices that went up in H&W and directed to Catholics went something along the lines, "Can't swim? Now's the time to learn!"
 
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For anyone who can access it, an excellent article by Fintan O'Toole in today's Irish Times:

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/...pluralism-we-have-to-let-it-back-in-1.4550117

There are two ways of thinking about the partition of Ireland 100 years ago. One is as a realist drama – the working out of the inevitable consequence of ruptures that were already irreconcilable. The other is to see it as a tragedy – the destruction of all the finest hopes for what Irish independence might have meant.

The first of these interpretations sits well with Ulster unionism; the second with Irish nationalism. But the choice between them is false. Partition was both an inevitability and a tragedy. We can surely, after a century of living with it, accept that the division of the island was at once unavoidable and calamitous.

What may be more difficult to accept is that it also suited an awful lot of people, not just in the new polity of Northern Ireland, but in the other entity that emerged shortly afterwards south of the Border. It was possible both to rail against partition and to live quite happily with the distribution of power it created and sustained.
 
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