Similarly, I've had to clarify that I was talking about TRADE unionists.



In the North, people will often ask you for your surname, because they can deduce whether you are protestant or catholic from that. I've had protestants shut down as soon as I introduce myself as "Brendan".

Having a "catholic" given name and "protestant" family name can be a great source of confusion for some of them.

Generally, though, as CaoimhínSF says, these are considerations that need to be made in the North, but are rarely a problem in the South.

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Múinteoir Gaeilge - Irish Teacher
My "specialty" is Connemara Irish, particularly Cois Fhairrge dialect, but I can also speak Ulster and Munster Irish with native-level pronunciation.
Is fearr Gaeilge ḃriste ná Béarla cliste, cinnte, aċ i ḃfad níos fearr aríst í Gaeilge ḃinn ḃeo na nGaeltaċtaí.
Gaeilge Chonnacht (GC), go háraid Gaeilge Chois Fhairrge (GCF), Gaeilic Uladh (GU), Gaelainn na Mumhan (GM), agus Gaeilge an Chaighdeáin Oifigiúil (CO).

This makes me think of the radio programmes on Radio Four by Gerry Anderson where he explained the niceties of guessing on which side somebody was when you met them in Norn Iron/Stroke City. He certainly knew how to be diplomatic.

I'm in the same situation. My first name is obviously Catholic, though not any more in America. When I was growing up among Baptists and Methodists in the South, many people had never heard it before, but it has since been popularized by a number of college and professional basketball players, and is now even a girl's name here. The woman I spoke to in the 70's might have misheard my first name (my accent was stronger then), and my last name is very "Protestant", so much so that there was an English bishop with the name who wrote the main apologia for the Church of England a long time ago. In our case, though, it's actually a mangled Scandinavian name that got "Americanized" (probably by some Irish-American clerk) after my great-grandfather married into an Irish Catholic family.

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I'm not a native (or entirely fluent) speaker, so be sure to wait for confirmations/corrections, especially for tattoos.

I don't know how long its been since you have been in the North Breandán but I would certainly refute the point that people will often ask you your surname to find out if you are protestant or catholic. I am from Fermanagh and work in Belfast and I can say that has never happened to me. There are a minority of people in lots of different countries who have their own prejudices and Ireland is no different in that respect. The majority of people in Ireland North or South won't give two hoots who or what you are.

I would say that things in the North have certainly changed for the better. The Troubles were hellish, and I think most people just want to leave that in the past and get on with the business of living.

Sometimes it seems you're more likely to encounter explicitly partisan people overseas. I was chatting with the grocery clerk here in my tiny town in California right after I got back from my first trip to Ireland in 2008, and she introduced me to the man standing in line behind me, who, she said, traveled to Ireland every year and was very proud of his Irish roots. He and I got to talking, and he asked me where all in Ireland I'd traveled. I mentioned Dublin, Ballyvaughan, Galway, Ennis, Gleann Cholm Cille, and Derry. As soon as I got to Derry, he seemed to freeze for a moment, and then said, rather coldly, "you mean Londonderry." This guy was an American...first generation at the very least, and most likely much farther back than that!

A visitor to Ireland, though (North or South) will be fine. As has been said in this thread already, a good conversational rule wherever you are is to avoid touching on the topic of politics.

Redwolf

If I could change the subject slightly, if you're going to the Aran Islands and/or The Burren, I would like to recommend these two very detailed maps compiled by Tim Robinson that are still available.
- Oileáin Arann 978 09530 5092 5 - there's also a Companion book that goes with it 978 0 9504 0027 3
- The Burren 978 0 9530 5091 8 - all published by Folding Landscapes.

The irony is that, before the Troubles, both Protestants and Catholics just called it Derry, except in formal circumstances. Then it became a political issue.

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I'm not a native (or entirely fluent) speaker, so be sure to wait for confirmations/corrections, especially for tattoos.

Yep. And they still do, for the most part.

Redwolf

I would suggest to you that when you live in a country you tend to work, play and otherwise interact within a fairly fixed sphere of places and people, and unconsciously you know what areas and people to avoid. So it may seem like "nobody I know ever says that" or "it has never happened to me".

Travellers, on the other hand, encounter a larger cross-section of the population somewhat randomly and tend to blunder into places and situations that the locals would just know not to go.

It had never have occurred to me that Bushmills was a "protestant" establishment until I got some strange reactions from the staff and asked our (Southern) bus driver about it. It was then that I heard they used to refer to it as "Paisley's Piss".

Similarly, our bus driver was made to park his bus at the back end of an empty car park at Giant's Causeway simply because his bus was clearly from the South.

One of my Northern Irish friends has absolutely no doubt why he was singled out for a boot inspection in the rain on a recent trip home. Even he was surprised in this day and age.

On the other side of the coin, you'll occasionally meet someone who boasts about their family's connection to the IRA, or still has a dig at the proddies.

Hopefully these are just the last vestiges of a time gone by. Certainly, the majority of people in both the North and South just want peace. Even so, the minority does still exist.

So whatever the frequency, or rarity, of the event, if, when travelling, you meet someone who insists that it is "Londonderry" not "Derry", or presses you for a surname, (or alternatively someone who boasts about the IRA) you should consider that you have encountered someone from the "old school", and take extra care not to talk politics.

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Múinteoir Gaeilge - Irish Teacher
My "specialty" is Connemara Irish, particularly Cois Fhairrge dialect, but I can also speak Ulster and Munster Irish with native-level pronunciation.
Is fearr Gaeilge ḃriste ná Béarla cliste, cinnte, aċ i ḃfad níos fearr aríst í Gaeilge ḃinn ḃeo na nGaeltaċtaí.
Gaeilge Chonnacht (GC), go háraid Gaeilge Chois Fhairrge (GCF), Gaeilic Uladh (GU), Gaelainn na Mumhan (GM), agus Gaeilge an Chaighdeáin Oifigiúil (CO).

You know, the reality is, you never know what may happen when you're traveling, and you kind of have to be prepared to go with the flow.

Generally speaking, politics haven't played a huge part in my visits to Ireland (other than as classroom discussion topics, as I've mentioned). There were a couple of interesting encounters last summer, however.

The first one happened on the day I spent exploring Dublin at the beginning of my trip. I decided to tour the Jameson's factory because I'm rather fond of the product, and I was lucky to be quick enough to get my hand up to be one of the group that gets to do a comparison test of Irish whiskey, Scotch, and Bourbon at the end of the tour (as if there were any comparison!).

As I was sitting at the table with my fellow lucky people, I struck up a conversation with two Irish couples who were seated near me. They rather enthusiastically volunteered that they were Protestants from Belfast who had come to Dublin to avoid "Marching Season." They asked me if I knew what that was, and I cautiously admitted that yes...I did. They went on to give me an earful of what an annoyance the whole thing was, while I nodded and said such profound things as "yes, I can see that." We actually got so far as my mentioning that I was there to study Irish (which I said with a bit of trepidation, but which they simply seemed to find interesting...especially the fact that I'd learned Irish in the U.S.). Then I somehow managed to spill my drink (and it was the Jamie's, dammit...not the nasty Bourbon! God, I hate Bourbon!), and it all turned to good-natured joking about "can't take you anywhere." Very much a congenial meeting, and not at all what I would have expected, to be honest.

The other one happened when I was riding from Gleann Cholm Cille to Gleann Fhinne with a fellow student (an Irishman). We had been chatting congenially when all of a sudden, out of the blue, he asked me "So what do you think about American imperialism?" I was quite taken aback, as that's just not the kind of thing you normally expect to hear from a person you just met about 30 minutes ago, especially when you hadn't been talking about politics at all (as I got to know the guy throughout the week, it kind of became clear that he had a few "filtering" issues). I stammered out something along the lines that I was opposed to imperialism in all its forms, and we went back to talking about the weather, or whatever it was we had been talking about.

I guess my point is that you do kind of have to be prepared for potential political situations to rear their heads (and this is true wherever you travel...not just Ireland), even if you don't seek them out. A good international traveler will be prepared to handle them diplomatically and tactfully.

Redwolf