"Southern Ireland"

liteweight said:
What I do mind is being asked when I intend visiting the 'mainland' again as they'd all love to see me.
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Tell them that you will be in France next month and then ask them when they are visiting the mainland next

TarfHead said:
An English colleague who lives in Greystones once received an unsolicited letter from Cablelink addressed to The Occupier. He arrived into work the next day brandishing the letter saying "Would you people ever get over it !"
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LOL
 
Surely with the post you should address it in a way that the local post office of the place you are sending the letter from will understand where it is meant to go. Republic of Ireland from the UK, Irland from Germany etc etc.

If I was sending a letter to Germany from here I would label it Germany. The German post office knows the rest of the address is in Germany so why should I say Deutschland when the Irish post office need to know which country it's to go to so I tell them in a language they understand.

Or am I simplifying things?
 
Every time I head over to work HQ in California somebody inevitably (and genuinely/innocently) asks "how are things/the weather/etc. in the UK?".
 
ClubMan said:
Every time I head over to work HQ in California somebody inevitably (and genuinely/innocently) asks "how are things/the weather/etc. in the UK?".
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A few years back I was told by a guy in Boston that I spoke very good English. I thanked him and said that he did too.
 
In '91 I was travelling from Austria into Czechoslovakia ( as it was then) and into Poland. At the time you needed a visa to enter, but I didn't know that. So I got on a night train and off I went, only to be horrified when the guards came around ( with rifles slung over their shoulders) looking for Visas. When I was ordered to produce my passport they genuinely thought it was fake as the two guards had never heard of Eire- they thought it was a made up country. After an interminable wait ( at gun point), eventually another guard came along with a big folder and the three went through it until they found Eire. They were very surprised. Cue much mirth. And I was marched off the train and put on the next train back over the border again. Didn't put me off though. Got a visa the next morning and went back in again. Happy days.
 
I was stopped going into Kenya in the 80's with my parents (I'm only a young fella). The immigration guys there didn't know where Eire was either. When we explained it was Ireland they said "Oh, Ireland! IRA!" and made actions and noises as if they were shooting machine guns. After that we were their best friends and they walked us through customs, had our bags collected for us and had a taxi bring us to our hotel for free. I don't think they liked the English.
 
Northern Ireland is part of the UK but is not British, something I like to remind Unionist friends about when the slagging starts.
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Why is it not British?


I think all of Ireland is/was also geographically part of the British Isles, doesn't mean we're British because we're Irish. But Northern Ireland is part of the UK so wouldn't they be called British in a political sense. BTW I think it's Collins English Dictionary or Reader Digest or something has recently decided that Ireland is not part of the British Isles anymore.
 
I think that Northern Ireland is not in Great Britain ( hence Great Britan and Northern Ireland) but is in the UK. thought we were all part of the British Isles though as its only a geographical term.
 
cuchulainn said:
I think that Northern Ireland is not in Great Britain ( hence Great Britan and Northern Ireland) but is in the UK. thought we were all part of the British Isles though as its only a geographical term.
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That's it.
I also like to point out that England is a theocracy where the head of state is also head of the state religion. Other than the Vatican I can't think of another country like that. This I also use to wind up English friends (and I point out that I'm a citizen, equal under the law and they are subjects, unequal under the law). I know in every practical sense England, and Britain, is as democratic as us but it makes great ammunition is a pub slagging match
 
The official term for our former main trading partner is: The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
 
See here.
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Whatever about being a theocracy in practice the UK is certainly a sectarian and anti-secular state in that it has an official state sanctioned established (probably some tautology there but not to worry...) church. What's interesting is that many of the non established religious groupings are keen that the CoE is not removed as the established church in case it leads to secularisation of the state and sidelining of religious groups/churches from matters of state.
 
Could someone clarify for me please whether there has ever been a political entity entitled "Southern Ireland"?
 
What precisely do you mean by "political entity"? Nation state/country or something else?
 
http://alt-usage-english.org/ireland.html

Some confusion surrounds the question of what we should call the independent sovereign state that occupies 80% of the land area of the island of Ireland. That confusion is entirely understandable, and the purpose of this note is to remove it.

The Irish Constitution of 1937 says: "The name of the State is Éire, or, in the English language, Ireland".

The Republic of Ireland Act, 1948, says: "It is hereby declared that the description of the State shall be the Republic of Ireland."

Irish passports simply bear the name Ireland.

Irish government regulations and official statements frequently refer to "the Republic of Ireland".


Comhairle, a statutory agency responsible for the provision of information, advice and advocacy to members of the public on social service, says on its web site:
'The names of political entities and other terms can often be quite contentious. The Irish and British governments have agreed to use the official names by which each state describes itself. (This agreement was made at the same time as the British-Irish Agreement). The correct name for this country is Ireland, not the "Republic of Ireland".'

.........so whilst it is strictly true that "Ireland" is the name of the republic, that does not mean that one should avoid the use of the phrase "Republic of Ireland", which frequently appears in directives, press releases and other official documents from the Irish government, as a search of their official web site at http://www.irlgov.ie/ will readily show.

The advice stands: in many contexts it is safe and uncontentious to refer to the Republic simply as "Ireland". Where the possibility of ambiguity exists, use "the Republic of Ireland".
 
Purple said:
.. but it makes great ammunition is a pub slagging match
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One ball I've tried (unsuccessfully) to hop with English folk is to ask what is it about them that is British, as distinct from English, i.e. where does their 'Englishness' stop and their 'Britishness' start ? I also tried to advance a theory, in a pub in Edinburgh, that there was no such thing as Scotland, that they were all English and that Scotland was just a tourism marketing concept. I was lucky to live that night and they say the Scots have a sense of humour ?

I also asked a gang of Leicester rugby supporters, on a train to Cardiff, to stop butchering Molly Malone and sing instead some old English songs. They scratched their heads for a while and then launched into Swing low sweet chariot .
 
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