The Friday Weigh-in

After the week in Japan it took a few days to get back to normal but thankfully I am feeling back on top form. I am weighing at between 75 and 76 kg so no real change there. To go any further I think that I need to change to a lot more weight training but I really don't have the energy right now to do anything out of the routine. Work is crazy right now but I guess that that is a good thing given the global economic climate. Since Japan I have kept going with learning Japanese and I have started relearning the Kana and I have also started looking at Kanji. It really is fascinating how complex the Japanese writing system is, its impossibility is its attraction.
On Monday I am supposed to go to my first Irish speakers' evening in a long while. I am pretty ashamed at how badly I speak the native Irish tongue but at least I will improve by actually using it. Luna is getting really into Irish dancing too so the links back to the homeland are getting stronger. The main thing that is making me happy right now is how well Luna is doing with her swimming lessons, she loves the water and we are so happy not to have the crying about swimming lessons that many Dutch-based parents have to deal with. Now I am looking forward to a nice, relaxing weekend.

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The Secret River

How can we dance when our earth is turning

How do we sleep while our beds are burning

"The Secret River" is a book that, once read, will not be forgotten. Unlike many historical novels this book avoids the didactic and instead lets the reader draw his own frightening conclusions. The novel is the story of a Londoner called William Thornhill, a man who has never known anything but struggle and endures a Sisyphus-like toil to provide for himself and his family. Circumstances lead him to make the wrong choices and he ends up faced with the choice between transport to Australia or the gallows.
Australia is where the novel really begins to grip. Kate Grenville writes so evocatively that one is transported seamlessly into the brutal world of the early New South Wales settlements. William Thornhill, having felt the rope wrapped around his neck, is determined to make the best of his new country while his wife Sal can only go on dreaming of the London she has left behind. The secret river of the title is the Hawkesbury where Thornhill stakes a claim to some land. The novel turns on the ensuing clash between Thornhill and the aboriginal natives. We are presented with his efforts to reach an accommodation, even to the point of watching his son integrate with the natives, eating their food, learning about their techniques, becoming one with them. Ultimately though his greed to possess, to occupy his own 'Thornhill Point' drives him to side with the other settlers who have no truck with 'the blacks'. History has already recorded the slaughter of the majority aboriginal Australians in the early years of the settlement. This novel tells a wonderful tale and puts a human face onto the settlers and their masters who changed what Australia was and made it what it is, for better or for worse.

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Ni Hao Kai-Lan

This is a cross-post from The Struggling Linguist:
When I was growing up we only had one television channel to watch so you made do with whatever was being broadcast by RTÉ. There was a dearth of programs for children but one show that we did get to watch was Sesame Street. Before I ever thought of learning Spanish words like agua, por favor and uno, dos, tres were drilled into my consciousness. The American version of Sesame Street was my first encounter with language teaching via the medium of children's television though I was totally unaware of this at the time.
Fast forward more than thirty years and there is a whole new world of programming available. Anybody with a child under the age of 5 will know Dora and her cousin Diego. These cute characters on Nickleodeon are introducing new languages to children all over the globe. My children watch the American version on DVD which teaches them basic Spanish so my girls who are 3 and 4 already can count to five in Spanish. On Dutch television Dora speaks Dutch interspersed with English and I imagine that most Dora versions worldwide use English as the second language. Dora is is maybe the most famous multilingual cartoon character but she is far from the only one. On Polish television we have both Noddy and Sesame Street teaching children French. The other day I walked in to the sitting room and I was greeted with a 'Bonjour!' by my daughter.
The latest (and for me the greatest) example of the trend is the new Nickleodeon cartoon 'Ni Hao Kai-Lan'. It is truly wonderful to watch this program where Chinese words are interspersed with Dutch as the main language. They even introduce the Chinese characters which is really funny considering that I am currently learning Japanese Kanji. One of my daughters was looking at the characters for the numbers 1 to 5 and was saying how strange it was because they are not the same as our numbers.

The beauty of this type of programming is not how it teaches language but how it creates language awareness in small children. Foreign languages are not strange alien sounds to be shut out, rather they are to be embraced and appreciated in a fun way. I was so impressed by 'Ni Hao Kai-Lan' that I have already ordered DVDs from the USA.

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Santogold

Not for the first time I am pretty late to the party but I just have to say that I am crazy about Santold's epononymous album from last year. I had heard her name mentioned a few times but I have to thank the brilliant MTV Brand New television channel for introducing me to her music. I saw the video for "Lights Out" and I was stunned, what a lady. It is hard to categorize her music, she has obviously listened to Siouxsie and the Banshees and I hear The Cure, grunge and urban mixed in there. These are the best new sounds I have heard in a long time.

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Culinary Lucky Dip

Anybody familiar with the way Japanese is written will appreciate how impossible it is to read a menu without knowing at least a few Kanji symbols. Basically Japanese would be straightforward to read if they just used one of the syllabaries (Hiragana or Katakana) because then you would be able to look the word up in a dictionary. With Kanji if you don't know what the symbol means then you can forget being able to look up its meaning.
All this means that you really are ordering blind in a restaurant where the staff speak little or no English and there are no pictures on the menu. I have experienced this culinary lucky dip twice already on this trip to Tokyo. The first time we were actually in a French style restaurant, this gradually became clear as we looked more closely at the decor, the cutlery was put on the table and the first course of terrine arrived. The second time we were in a sashimi restaurant but there were a couple of people who were no really fish fans. The waiter did speak a bit of English so he ordered some meat dishes for us too. What was served was delicious and it was all the more tasty for being unexpected. Japanese restaurants tend to want to please foreign guests so I really do like eating out here.
Ordering blind can go very very wrong though. I remember one time going to a Catalan restaurant in Barcelona and ordering from a Catalan menu without having an idea what I would get. The waitress spoke no English and my Spanish was then non-existent. She did manage to communicate a degree of shock at what I was ordering but I missed the hint. She came back a bit later with a plate on which a fat white sausage wobbled on a bed of white broad beans. I barely tasted the thing, it was absolutely revolting. I still have nightmares about it.

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Karaoke

After a reasonable amount of sleep my jetlag has been conquered so today sees me in far better form. Yesterday evening I has quite the Japanese karaoke experience. My company has a reception room with a bar and a karaoke machine. We had a welcome party there and after eating and enjoying a few beers the atmosphere was ripe to propose singing a tune. I don't think that it would have all started if I hadn't signalled my enthusiasm but as soon as my Japanese colleagues knew that I was willing the show started. My one condition was that I would sing second so one of my colleagues set the ball rolling with a melodramatic slice of J-Pop. The bar was set very high for me as I stepped up to sing "The Sweetest Thing" by U2. I should have maybe realized that U2 songs are tricky because I had taken to the stage with "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" in Poland last year and I had trouble hitting a few of the high notes there.
Anyway my performance was shaky in parts but I gained in confidence and towards the end I was enjoying it and I was sad when the last note sounded. Now, the kudos were in the bag for having sang a tune and the audience is much more tolerant at the beginning. After another J-Pop tearjerker about luuurve my American colleagues were pressured into singing. As it turned out one Texan can really sing and he did Kenny Rogers proud with "The Gambler". I know enough about karaoke to know that you just do not want to follow a really good performance like that so I was loving it now because I had done my part and the momentum was there so that my unwilling European colleagues knew that somebody else would have to sing. One Dutch guy sang a Jack Johnson tune and he made a good job of it. The Japanese guys did not need to be asked twice to sing, they love their karaoke.
All in all it was great to do the karaoke thing with my Japanese compadres because you hear about this and see it in films and television. Love it

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Jetlagged in Tokyo

After my experience a couple of months back I was prepared for the jetlag so it was no surprise that I was wide awake at 1 AM. this morning. My hotel has an all-night gym so I made use of the facility at 2 AM. After that I spent a while reading before going for a walk at 4 AM and then eating breakfast at 6 AM. Basically jetlag means that you end up having a day behind you before the day has even started. Whilst out on my stroll I took advantage of a vending machine that sells bottles of hot drinks. I am a big fan of the lemon tea, I am surprised that we don't have these machines in Europe. It's the afternoon here now but I wish it was night because I'm bushed.

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The Friday Weigh-in

This week my house was like a sick bay as one after the other the girls in my life succumbed to a bug which may or may not have been related to the flu epidemic sweeping over our nether lands. The resultant sleep deprivation knocked my training for six but I still weighed in today at just under 76 kg so my weight is certainly not increasing though the chances of reaching my target of 72 kg any time soon are slim. My intensive Japanese absorption has gone really well, I have learned more in two weeks than I did on a whole course a few years back. I think that using the MP3 player to listen to podcasts is the way to go for other languages too so I am considering starting Italian again this way. On Sunday I am off to Tokyo again which should be very inspiring. I am currently enamoured with all things Japanese, hopefully this will not be the last trip there this year.

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Sick Days

In my work career I have never taken a day off sick. It's not that I never get sick, I have just never felt sick enough that I should take a day off work. I have a very Calvinist view on these things, I would really have to be dying before I would take a day off. Luckily I don't think that I have ever had a flu because I have heard that you know all about if you have one and you just cannot function. Hangovers in my younger days were the only thing that ever stopped me doing my job properly.
There is an ethical dilemma here though. If you are really sick you should not go to work because of the risks of infecting your colleagues with a virus. There is no medal for struggling through and turning up if the end result is that half of your colleagues end up with your disease. In Japan you have the whole culture of wearing a face mask to prevent spreading infectious diseases, I have read before that this is singularly ineffective but I guess that it makes them feel better.
For me though taking sick days would be a slippery slope thing. If you have a very low threshold for taking a sick day (e.g. small headache, slight cough) then I believe that there is a momentum that builds up so that you stop being critical about whether you should turn up at work. Sure, some people have worse health than others but there is a big grey area where one man's sickness is another man's slight niggle.
I missed a few school days when I was very young with chicken pox and measles but since the age of ten I don't remember missing a day of school, university or work through illness. I think that it is genetic to an extent because my mother never gets sick either. Parenthood definitely changes the sickness equation too. Unless you have people to look after small kids going to your sick bed is not an option. The Calvinist in me thinks of the farmer toiling day in and day out without taking a sick day. The realist in me knows that it is not quite so simple. Some people are just more vulnerable to coming down with illness and I am working on being more tolerant of this despite my natural instincts.

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10 Year Anniversary

This month I celebrate the ten year anniversary of my move to Holland. Back in 1999 the world looked a lot different to me than it does now. I was young, free and single. Now I'm a lot balder, married with children, mortgage bonded but altogether happier. When I decided to move to Holland I had enough money in my bank account to take me to Australia and I had a one year work visa in my passport. I made the decision not to go to Australia because I though that Holland was the country that matched me more than anywhere I had ever been. There have been ups and downs but moving here was undoubtedly the best decision I have ever made.
Ten years also brings to an end something which came as an unexpected surprise. My motivations in moving here were not financial in any way but because I worked in IT I qualified for the 30% ruling which allows foreign recruited employees to have 30% of their salary tax free. It was great while it lasted and February's wage slip will have a significantly different look to it. Luckily the ECB have been dropping their rates so quickly that the difference will not be as dramatic as it might have been at the height of the financial crisis. It was nice while it lasted though.

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The Struggling Linguist

Up until now I have posted on a real hotchpotch of topics on this blog. The advantage of this approach is that I just write about what I feel like. The disadvantage is that some of the content is not reaching its intended audience. There are few listings of language blogs on which Faoiseamh appears because of the lack of specialization. In order to redress this I have set up The Struggling Linguist again and this blog is going to specialize on language and multilingual issues. I have imported the Faoiseamh languages related archive to the new blog but I will leave the historical posts here to avoid dead links. In any case Faoiseamh will still be the main blog for spouting on about life, the universe and everything.

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4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days

As I don't get to watch too many films these days I have totally missed out on the Romanian new wave cinema from the last few years. I was a Dogma fan in my younger years and "4 Months, 3 Weeks  & 2 Days" brought back memories of the cinematographic techniques used in those films. The story pulls no punches, it relates how two friends cope with arranging an illegal abortion in Communist Romania. The urban landscape is bleak, many of the characters are  rude and brutal. The main character Otilia is brilliantly acted and as in many Dogma films you end up feeling a very real participant in her reality. The film does not provide any happy endings, the only joy you have is knowing that you are not living in Communist Romania in 1987.

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Fasting, Feasting

"Fasting, Feasting" by Anita Desai was a book I enjoyed very much. It is not really one novel. Instead there are two stories, one set in India and one set in America. The Indian part centres around Uma, the aging daughter who has foregone a life of her own to stay at home with her parents. The story does not reach a concrete conclusion, rather it is a series of observations about Indian culture at a certain moment in time. The American story is a cutting snapshot of the bountiful, consumerist society which creates its own pressures. The novel is full of humour and telling insights into the nature of family, duty and questions whether material wealth is inextricably linked with spiritual poverty. This is a nice book to read on a plane journey.

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The Friday Weigh-in

The new year is underway and I managed to get through the holidays without putting on any weight so I am holding steady at just over 76kg. Considering that my diet went to pot during the break I did well to maintain the status quo. I did manage to go to the gym most days though so that counteracted the calorie overload. This week I have been walking to and from work to continue my intensive Japanese training, which is going very well. I am making it to the gym on every second evening. The very cold weather makes the idea of swimming during lunch on the odd days very unappealing. I have a holiday in the sun to look forward to next month so my motivation to stay in shape is stronger than ever so even the freezing cold is not going to undermine my battle with the bulge.

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Ba, ba, babbling

When you have your first child all first events are world shattering events. Most parents are filled with a virulent urge to tell all who might want to listen about baby's progress. By the time you get to number three everything is a little bit more relaxed but that does not mean that the little milestones are any less enjoyable.
As a lover of language the speech development of babies is something that fascinates me. For a long time Nadia has been sticking her tongue out, singing to herself in her cot or spitting and spluttering in reply to what we might say to her, all of the precursors to the beginning of speech.
Then a few days ago the ba, ba, ba began and now that is the answer to everything. 'Are you a good girl? Ba, ba, ba', 'Say mama. Ba, ba, ba', 'Say dada. Ba, ba, ba'.
One syllable and yet so much joy. I cannot get enough of this babbling, this ba, ba, ba.

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Language Learning and Open Courseware

Finding the best approach to learning a language is a bit like developing the best therapy for an ailment, often a combination of methods is better than looking for a silver bullet, all-in-one, latest greatest method. Language materials are normally designed for a broad spectrum audience and this often means that a language element you feel very comfortable with is not addressed until later in the course than you would like. With Japanese I have a few textbooks that I used previously including the well-known "Japanese For Busy People" and I use these together with "Teach Yourself Japanese" which is my base textbook. I have used Teach Yourself books for several languages and I can certainly recommend the Spanish, Polish, Turkish, Swedish and German versions too.

However, although I like "Teach Yourself Japanese" and what the other books offer I have still been missing something. There seems to be a reluctance in all of the books to introduce Japanese verb structures too quickly while, for me, verbs are critical in order to hit the ground running with a language. Once you have verbs you can try English words for nouns you don't know but without them you are left unable to express almost anything in your new language.
Thankfully the gap has been filled by downloading a Beginner's Japanese course from the MIT Open Courseware site. I cannot recommend this site enough if you want to learn about practically anything, MIT provides all of this high quality learning material free of charge. Their Japanese course is structured exactly how I want in order to grasp Japanese grammar quickly.
MIT is not the only university with Open Courseware, there are many others who are part of the Open Courseware Consortium. It is one of the most revolutionary ideas of our time to put so much knowledge out there gratis. Surprising I have never spoken to anybody else who has taken advantage of it.

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The Counting Language

The term mother tongue is still used quite often to define one's native language. It is not necessarily accurate given the increasing complex sociological make-up of modern society but still most children learn their first words in their mother's language. My children are no exception and for the first few years of their lives the two older girls lived in a Polish dominant universe where English and Dutch were welcome guests but were certainly not central to proceedings.
When multilinguals are asked to fill in their mother tongue on a form a rule of thumb is to choose the language in which they count. People who have lived practically their whole life in another country still go back to the mother tongue when they need to count, here is a nice extract from a post I found on the mother tongue:
"When the ATM coughs outs a bushel of cash or I am trying to perform a magic trick with my checkbook, trying to glean something from nothing, I leave English behind. American dollars, the lack of which constitutes an immigrant's most elemental fright, are denominated entirely in the Russian language."
If your mother tongue is the language in which you count then I fear that my children are gradually severing the the linguistic cord and beginning to embrace mother Dutch. If anything illustrates the ongoing takeover of Dutch in the three-way linguistic struggle in their minds it is counting.
Luna is four and in Group 1 at a Dutch primary school. She loves counting so whilst reading books I often ask her to count animals, shells or whatever she sees on the page. As an experiment both Aga and I have been asking both girls to count in one a particular language at a time (e.g. Count that in English, okay now in Dutch etc.). With Luna the results are quite interesting:

1. In English she can count perfectly well to 16 and then sometimes needs prompts to get to 20. She was saying the Dutch twintig until last week but now miraculously she says twenty but she can go no further.
2. In Polish she regularly makes mistakes with forgetting 7 or 8 and does not get to 20 comfortably at all.
3. In Dutch she can count perfectly to 30 and beyond once she is prompted. She was also asking us what honderd (100) and duizend (1000) are in Polish and English so even the large numbers are in her consciousness.

Daisy is three and goes to a Dutch playschool five days a week. As you would expect her counting ability is more limited than her older sister but the results are also worth noting:

1. In English she can count to 10 quite well but sometimes forgets a number. In general she seems to like counting in English.
2. In Dutch she can count to 10 with some difficulty but she is clearly familiar with the numbers already.
3. In Polish she can also count to 10 reasonably well.

Clearly the influence of school is pushing Dutch ahead as Luna's counting language and new 'mother tongue'. We can expect exactly the same scenario with Daisy next year when she is in Group 1. The fact that English holds up so well as a counting language and outperforms Polish is most probably due to the influence of television. They watch more cartoon type programs on Polish children's television while they watch CBeebies a lot through English which has more educational elements. Also the Dutch version of Dora on Nick Jr. teaches counting through English. The Dora factor can also been seen in the fact that Luna can count to 5 in Spanish since the English language Dora teaches counting in Spanish.
Once you move into any kind of arithmetic in the future they are sure to use the school language so Dutch will become ever more dominant. Given that so many children are schooled in a language other than that of their mother it shows how misleading the terms mother tongue or native language are. Surprisingly there do not seem to be any other terms in common usage to define one's dominant language so I guess that we have to make do with them for now.

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Cherishing the Irish Diaspora

I listened to most of the recent Presidential Lectures series hosted by the Irish President Mary McAleese and broadcast on RTE. At times I found it quite difficult listening as there was quite a lot of self-congratulation and chest thumping. The Celtic Tiger years were lauded quite uncritically by a number of speakers including the President though the current Irish economic predicament is clearly linked to mistakes made during the boom years.
One thing that grated particularly was what the President herself had to say about the Irish diaspora. Basically she thinks that the Irish diaspora have a unique link with Ireland that other emigrant nations cannot emulate. Evidently the Irish retain a much stronger affection for the home country and this is a resource which can be tapped into for Ireland's benefit. Now, David McWilliams has been arguing for a long time that Ireland needs to embrace the soft power of its diaspora in the same way as Israel benefits from the global Jewish community. There is certainly something there.
However, as one of the Irish diaspora, I have to say that President McAleese has it very wrong if she thinks that the Irish have stronger bonds with the home country than other diasporas. In fact I would argue that the links that other nationalities, with the Polish being the one I know best, have much closer bonds with the mother country. The reasons why are not so mysterious:
1) The Right to Vote - Ireland is a major global exception in that it denies its foreign based citizens the right to vote. David McWilliams compared this to the Polish attitude in a piece in 2007 which is worth reading and where you can spot a few comments I made at the time.
2) International Television Station - As I have both cable and satellite channels I can see for myself just how many countries broadcast an international channel. Just to name a few we have Polonia (Poland), RAI International (Italy), TV Romania International, TV5 (France), TVE International (Spain). There are countless others and many broadcasting from countries with less money than Ireland. Why are they doing this? Because they cherish the diaspora, that's why! Sure I can watch RTE programs on the net but an international channel helps create an international Irish community, it's logical.
3) Cultural Institute - Wherever you go in the world you seem to find a Goethe Institut, an Instituto Cervantes, an Alliance Francaise, a British Council office. These cultural institutes offer language classes, cultural events and a focal point for people from those countries. If Ireland seriously wants to embrace the international Irish community this is the kind of thing you need. In Holland there is an Irish Club and there are Irish Dancing schools and various Irish events but the ideal would be to have these housed in a cultural institute for Irish people and those interested in Ireland.
4) Language - Many Irish people are enamoured with the fact that English is the first language of Ireland but you can sure see what a disadvantage this is when you look at the diaspora. If an Irish person has children in another English speaking country and does not bring their children up as Irish speakers then the chances are very high that the child will slip straight into the foreign identity. President McAleese's idea that the Irish diaspora is uniquely attached to Ireland is clearly undermined when you meet a Polish kid born in Holland who speaks Polish like somebody from the home country, regularly watches Polish television, reads Polish books etc. I am trying my best to give my kids as much Irishness as possible but let me tell you that I cannot compete with Dutch and Polish culture because once you speak English you are already in an international setting where American and British influences are just as strong as Irish ones. Promoting the Irish language at home and abroad is another very strong medium to bind the diaspora.
5) Passports - Getting an Irish passport for yourself is a pain, getting one for your children is root canal surgery. Try getting a Dutch policeman or council worker to witness your signatures on the photographs and on the forms. It is major hassle and serves no purpose. End result is that my older daughter has an Irish passport, my two younger daughters have Irish ones. I want them to have Irish passports but they don't make it easy so that's Poland 2 - Ireland 1 then President McAleese.
So, I totally agree with David McWilliams that the diaspora can play a role in Ireland's future but the Irish state needs to do a lot more before it can leverage this asset.

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Intensive Japanese

When I was in Japan in November I did my best to use my limited Japanese and promised myself (and many Japanese colleagues) that I would do better the next time I came. I wasn't quite expecting that my next visit would be so soon but it turns out that I am going to Tokyo again in a fortnight. In order to make good on my promise I am devoting myself to Japanese for the next two weeks. Armed with my recently purchased Sennheiser headphones and my MP3 player my 30 minute walk to and from work has Teach Yourself Japanese on spool. Every evening I am going to do at least an hour's text book work. It is easy to be motivated when I know that I will have the chance to put my Nihongo to use again soon. Tokyo here I come!

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Meet Maluch

I am not normally in the business of giving pet names to inanimate objects but this weekend I acquired an Acer Aspire One which is a mini notebook and I am simply head over heels in love. This machine is light, cute, stylish and starts up and shuts down in seconds. It has its own version of a Linux operating system. This baby really allows network computing as I remember Sun predicting years ago. The price tag was just 229 Euro delivered to my door.

So anyway in order to cement my passion for my new friend I just had to give it a name. I am pleased to introduce Maluch (ch as in Scottish loch). Anybody who has visited Poland will have seen the ultra mini Fiat Maluch cars which are an omnipresent vista in her cities. In fact my brother-in-law used to drive a particularly down-trodden example which has since departed for the great scrapyard in the sky.

Let's hope that Maluch will be my blogging muse in 2009 and inspire me to keep blogging regularly.

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The Power of Sub-titles

During the holidays I have been doing a lot of zapping through all of our cable and satellite channels. One gem I have found is Slovenian television. It seems that Slovenia has the same approach to foreign language television as say Holland or Portugal, they sub-title programs in English. The larger European countries like Germany, France and Poland all opt to dub foreign language programs. It is no surprise that the standard of spoken English is generally higher in countries where they use sub-titles. I don't know any Slovenians but I wonder if they are up there with the Dutch in English speaking ability.
Anyway none of our Polish channels uses sub-titles so this way of picking up new vocabulary has been blocked for me. However, Slovenian shares an enormous range of vocabulary with Polish so all last night I was asking my wife if they have this or that word in Polish too (inevitably they did).
In my experience the best way to learn new words is watching shows in English with sub-titles in the target language. The next best option is watching shows in the target language with sub-titles in that language. If the sub-titles are in English I find that I am distracted from listening to what is being said. The worst option is having no sub-titles because you just miss so much unless you are fluent. I can watch Dutch, German and Polish television comfortably without sub-titles, French and Spanish tend to be spoken so quickly that I much prefer having my little helper.
I actually watched a show in Slovenian to hear what that sounded like. It is a very curious language like Russian spoken with an Italian accent, or at least that is my first impression. I did not detect any German influence but maybe I need to hear a lot more Slovenian before I can call this one.

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Martin O'Neill on what it means to be Irish

I was listening to RTE radio yesterday and I happened to catch the lecture Aston Villa manager Martin O'Neill gave on what it means to him to be Irish (you can find the podcast here).
Given the fact that he is from a northern nationalist background I found it fascinating listening. I was very surprised to hear him using a number of terms that I would regard as being unionist. He called Great Britain the mainland which is a term that would be antithetical to many Irish nationalists, however with the UK qualifier it is not actually incorrect. What surprised me more was when he said that 'Ulster Irishmen are different to Irishmen from the Republic". Well, as three Ulster counties are in the Republic that is quite a strange thing to say unless he was using Ulster as a synonym for Northern Ireland. What disappointed me was his partitionist view. Of course there are differences between the inhabitants of the two Irish states, after years of conflict in the north and the stronger British influences there (small example saying Boxing Day instead of St. Stephen's Day) it could hardly be otherwise. However there are alo acute differences between people from rural Ireland and people from Dublin. It does not mean that we are somehow different strains of Irish.
Martin O'Neill saw it as some sign of progress that he, from an Irish nationalist background, had been interviewed for the post of England manager. I don't see why that would be surprising. If as a player he had caused some kind of political stir by refusing to represent Northern Ireland and opting for the southern team I could understand his surprise. He represented a team whose supporters flew Union Jacks and whose anthem is 'God Save the Queen', just like em.....England (in recent years their fans have chosen the England flag more widely admittedly) .
One other interesting thing was when he said that he asked his daughter, who has lived all of her life in England, if she was English or Irish. Her reply was that he shouldn't have to ask that. I am not sure if that meant that she felt more Irish than English. My daughters will clearly be more Dutch than Irish or Polish. I have no illusions about that. If I were a native Irish speaker and could bring them up through Irish I might be able to create a bubble in which they would be 'more' Irish but given that I speak English to them how can they be strongly Irish?
Anyway, it was interesting to hear his take on what it means to be Irish and I would recommend listening to what he had to say if you get a chance.

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