RYAN Tubridy, of The Late Late Show, RTÉ Radio Two, and the BBC has recently released a book called The Irish Are Coming which celebrates those Irish who went to Britain and made a name for themselves.
Inside the flimsy cover of being about Ireland and Britain it is a book that merely celebrates the Gods of our age. Celebrities, in one form or another.
This is not a book about the Irish experience in Britain or about the negotiations to be made between Irishness and Britishness, it is instead a fawning round of applause for all those who crave that very applause.
Of course, lots of Irish in Britain did do well for themselves and found a life there that was not available in an Ireland that had turned its back on them.
The freedom that was to be found in leaving Ireland is always part of the story of emigration.
Where the very basis of a book like Tubridy’s becomes undone though is that the unquestioning celebration of success means that we should all be pleased, for instance, for those Irish who got rich and successful off the back of their fellow Irishmen and women.
The big, unwritten story of the Irish in Britain is not one whereby we are able to join in with a didn’t-we-do-well cheer for ourselves but one whereby we ask questions of those developers and contractors who gave rise to the saying ‘never work for the Irish’.
And that was a saying of the Irish themselves.
It is probably unfair though to attack Tubridy’s fluffy book for being fluffy.
It is just that I have read a lot about the Irish in Britain and to see this book get categorised as being about that very subject and to get attention because of the author is a little annoying to say the least.
Where Ryan Tubridy is of interest though is in the few revealing lines that this book offers, alongside the reality of his own background.
In keeping with the tone of the book, Tubridy writes of a lunch date with Terry Wogan and of travelling in Wogan’s chauffeur-driven Bentley.
Over lunch Terry Wogan, the self-styled master of UK-friendly Irish Blarney, states that the "Irish middle-classes, to which I belong, have always aspired to being British". Now who would have thought it? Out of the mouth of Terry Wogan via the pen of Ryan Tubridy, one of Ireland’s little secrets slips out.
Of course Wogan can safely admit this because he has made his living in Britain out of being an Irishman.
The Irish middle classes would never freely admit this, even as they cringe when they hear a real Dublin or Cork accent.
They would never admit it even as they tune in to their leader-in-chief, ironically enough another broadcasting star Gay Byrne, bemoaning such things as the Irish saying tree instead of three. Good old Gay is a stickler for the Queen’s English.
Still on the theme of class, Tubridy himself writes of the Irish success in British broadcasting that "when someone from Ireland comes on television in the UK, the accent is classless.
"You can’t tell how many bedrooms there were in their childhood home or whether their family employed servants or worked below stairs themselves. The fact that we don’t fall neatly into the British class system helps the Irish."
Now apart from having a view of British society and its class divisions that seems to have been learnt from Downton Abbey, Tubridy’s words betray a whole lot of assumptions and deceptions.
It is true that to the British ear all that is heard in an Irish voice is a general Irishness but that does not mean that is what exists.
For instance, Tubridy himself, ex-pupil of the exclusive, fee-paying Blackrock College is nothing if not an Irish version of the archetypal British public schoolboy.
His voice may merely appear Irish to the listeners of BBC Radio 2 but it is quite clear what he sounds like to the rest of us.
For Ryan Tubridy to analyse the British for having a class system is simply a way of showing just how clever the Irish middle classes are at deflecting any notion of an Irish class system, even when they fully know they embody that very thing.
David Cameron’s attempts to re-brand himself as ‘Dave’ have always met with derision because we know him to be from a self-serving elite who have very little knowledge of how the majority live.
Isn’t it time, Ryan, that we talked about our own self-serving elite?
