Lorraine Courtney: Urbane culchies still face same old stereotypes
‘WHO’S he?” says the boyfriend when I mention that Big Tom has died. He isn’t from the country and icons of the showband scene don’t feature in his cultural references. But watching Alison Spittle’s ‘Culchie Club’ recently I was most struck by how the distinctive differences between city and country have mostly disappeared.
“I’m going to find out what it means to be a proud culchie,” Alison told us at the top of the programme. But the culchies she interviewed for her show weren’t very culchie-like at all.
Culchies used to be clearly definable but she met drag queens in Mayo, farming families watching livestreams of cattle marts and Kerry bloggers. It was obvious from their clothes, accents and smartphones that this is a new species of culchie that’s urbane and connected. Not a single one of them looked like they might shout “How’s she cuttin’?” while wolfing back a hang sangwich.
In fact it was the chorus of young Dubliners in the vox pop that come across as blinkered stereotypes. Ah yes, Dublin people who don’t know the country and imagine that all culchies are pure thickos who go to Mass every Sunday, vote pro life and don’t have any gays in their village.
You see there used to be two Irelands: a small urban Ireland, and a big, big rural Ireland. Obviously, now that every high street in the country looks identical, and everyone under 30 uses exactly the same American rising inflection when they speak, programmes like Spittle’s are based on false and twee notions.
I’m a proud culchie, or at least I became one when I moved to Dublin. No matter that I’ve lived abroad in a city 10 times the size of our little capital. And just like I never thought of myself as a culchie before coming to live in Dublin, neither had I very much in common with people from counties other than my own.
Growing up in Kerry, I’d thought I had heard every joke and stereotype there is about living in Kerry. When I got to college, I came across a strange grey area of prejudice that still creeps into my day-to-day Dublin life. Nearly everyone assumed I had a particular background, one that included sheep farming, jiving and knowing everyone in my town.
People assumed I was backward, or at least fairly sheltered.
Actually I think I was fairly well-informed in comparison with the southsiders in my class. I’d experienced city life on a Finnish gap year and small town living. Plus, there was this thing called the internet that made it easy to stay up to date with life in the outside world. I’d visited plenty of other places in the world, because you know, there are cars, trains, airplanes, and stuff.
“You don’t sound like you’re from Kerry?” they’d say and mean it as a compliment. Well, not everyone’s accent is the full Healy-Rae. We don’t have Irish research on regional accent discrimination but an ITV study found that more than a quarter of Britons (28pc) feel they have been discriminated against because of their regional accent but also, according to another batch of research by the law firm Peninsular,
Ah yes, Dublin people who don’t know the country and imagine all culchies are pure thickos who go to Mass every Sunday, vote pro life and don’t have any gays in their village
that 80pc of employers admit to making discriminating decisions based on regional accents.
It’s worth pointing out that the majority of people who said these things weren’t looking to make me feel upset or embarrassed. In fact, they seemed to think I would find it funny – that it’s just something everyone LOLs about. But it was still hard to challenge them and I longed for the day I could just respond by saying “Well that was rude”. But, I doubt I’ll ever get there. Maybe that’s just the friendly culchie in me.
Unlike years ago, a cultural divide between urban and rural people doesn’t really exist anymore. My generation grew up online and, while digital life certainly has its downsides, this has also meant that our horizons were wide from the outset. We were exposed to a wide variety of different opinions and ways of life.
WE might not be able to buy a house, but the chances are we’ve seen a lot more of the world than the generations before us. And as algorithms shape which content we consume on our feeds, we have all learned to want the same things. It’s globalisation, but intensified, made more accessible to a wider spectrum of people, more of the time.
Culchies have changed and the old stereotypes aren’t true or helpful today. But thinking about who you really are, where you’ve come from and who you would like to be, is always better than disappearing into the bland global brew that threatens cultures everywhere.