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Posted Mar 20, 2020, 3:30 PM
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I ♣ Baby Seals
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Join Date: Jul 2012
Location: Sin Jaaawnz, Newf'nland
Posts: 35,088
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Docere
St. Patrick's Day tomorrow. Does the "Irish" community exist outside of a few pockets in the diaspora nowadays?
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Irish influence is still the dominant cultural influence here. My favourite examples are tourists from Ireland thinking we're mocking their accent, and all of the Irish press fawning over how similar it is. This is a nice example - an Irish photographer met a Newfoundland girl and couldn't place which part of Ireland her accent was from, was shocked to learn she was from here, ended up settling here, etc.
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I grew up in Dublin. I knew very little of Newfoundland. When I first met my Newfoundland-born wife while we were both working in the United States, I was intrigued by her accent. I could not identify what part of Ireland she was from! I was surprised to hear that she wasn’t from Ireland but was from Canada.
Yet she seemed so Irish, and my family — when they attended our wedding here in St. John’s more than 20 years ago — told friends back home, “Sure, Newfoundland is just like Ireland!”
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https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/long...ord-connection
What makes the Irish influence here so durable and strong is that almost all of us came from one small region of Ireland (Waterford/Wexford and the countryside in between). If you took a random small town in Portugal and moved it to an otherwise uninhabited island, a few centuries later it'd still be very Portuguese, even if dozens of families from all over Spain (in our case, England) had joined them over the years.
BUT... Irish is only a descriptor, or us giving credit to where we know our culture came from. We're still not Irish. We're Newfoundlanders - with strong English influences, and visible Scottish, Welsh, French, and Portuguese influences.
You'll often see Irish-Newfoundland or Newfoundland-Irish used as a adjective. But never JUST Irish.
For example, Irish Newfoundland Pub:
Or Irish Newfoundland (as a description of our traditional music) radio show:
We have all the same Irish folk songs (there were only two we could find that performers at the pubs in Dublin didn't know when we were there in September), but also our own in the same style:
• Video Link
And the band me mudder named me after.
• Video Link
So we're Newfoundlanders (in polls here, a vast majority of the population say they are Newfoundlanders even before being Canadian) but if you ask us what that means, then we'll say it's mostly Irish, with some other stuff mixed in.
When we were in Galway, one guy would not believe I wasn't from Waterford (which he knew particularly well). I would've had to produce my parents' birth certificates to change his mind lol I cherish the memory You know how some North Americans are desperate to be Irish? I don't have that. My juvenile affliction is a subconscious desperation to not be a generic Canadian - I just find it so reserved, boring, fake. So that's the motivation behind my cherishing moments like that one lol
BUT, playing my own devil's advocate... this Irish reporter clearly thought we were very Canadian. Her writing is fantastic - bolded the parts that made me laugh out loud:
The most Irish island in the world
The residents of Newfoundland don’t like being called ‘Newfies’ or Canadians, but you can call them Irish. And the town of Tilting, on its little-brother island of Fogo, is ‘Irish on the rocks’
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Newfoundland is not Canada, as the people there never tire of telling you. “Canada”, in this context, is not just a euphemism for “boring”, “law-abiding” or “flat”, the island only voted to join the confederation of provinces in 1948, and that vote was split 51 to 49 per cent – a cause of some abiding bitterness among the baymen, the former fishermen who live along these rocky shores.
Greg Malone, who wrote Don’t Tell the Newfoundlanders: The True Story of Canada’s Confederation with Newfoundland, says people have brought the book into cemeteries to read aloud over their parents’ graves, to tell them they were right all along.
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So you can’t call them “Newfies”, and you can’t call them Canadians, but they will let you call them Irish – unless their ancestors came from Devon, but those ones are easy to spot because they talk like people from Devon. The Irish talk like they came from Dungarvan. Their accents were preserved by the salt Atlantic air, in tiny isolated communities along the shore. It was a long time before they got roads.
These days, the highway is long and the traffic serene: everyone drives like a lady or like a Canadian. “It looks like Canada to me,” I said to one dissenter and pointed out a hillside of pine trees that was only a Mountie short of a postcard. “That’s not pine,” he said (he seemed a bit shocked). “There’s no pine over there. Those trees are spruce and fir.”
It may all look the same to an outsider, but as you travel through the vast beauty of the landscape, you begin to lose yourself in the fractal variation of one bay or inlet that is crucially different to the inlet or bay before it, and the names you pass are more a story than a map: Random Island, Come by Chance, Witless Bay.
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Winds rake the island of Fogo, icebergs float past in the early summer and whales blow. The first Irish settler, Thomas Burke, arrived here in 1752. The first known grave of an Irish emigrant is up on the hillside: Michael Greene from Carrick-on-Suir. The headstone gets all the spellings right and says he was buried in 1856. He has a magnificent view. There is a faded wreath and a prayer, written on a piece of paper and protected by a plastic bag, propped up against the stone. They were placed there in 2011 by a group from Carrick-on-Suir and the prayer ends with the words: “God bless Michael Greene and all who followed him.”
A few Irish politicians turned up when Tilting was declared a National Historic Site in 2003 and RTÉ did a documentary in 2011. There is a Féile Tilting each September, which last year was linked live to Youghal local radio. And it certainly is freakish and lovely to hear these clear and yearning accents of a people who, after centuries, still look over the Atlantic towards home.
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The pain of emigration is repeated here, almost as a race memory, and the songs of sorrow and loss are put to new use for the generations gone since the fisheries closed. In Joe Batt’s Arm, Zita Cobb remembers the exact date she left the island for a new life in Ottawa. It was just before she turned 13. Cobb, who went on to make a fortune in fibre optics, came back to Fogo some years ago and started an island regeneration scheme, which is part international arts foundation and part internationally expensive hotel.
The hotel, just opened in June, is a remarkable postmodern building, one end propped up on stilts that are two stories high. It was built, in part, by Irish workers, who were imported, in a gang, all the way from Toronto, because there is a construction boom in St John’s.
Their names are on a map of Ireland pinned to the wall of Foley’s shed: men from Malin, Letterkenny, Westport, and Monaghan. They came here to socialise (that is what happens in Newfoundland “sheds”) and then they too left, leaving a brand new bodhrán, a dead email address, a charitable cheque for a sick child. They went back to Toronto or, some of them, home for a while to Ireland. One of them found a girlfriend in St John’s, and stayed.
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Ah, authenticity. It’s as rare these days as cod. Outside, the weather shifts as fast as Irish weather – only much bigger. In this part of the world, the storms can kill you, the wilderness can still swallow you, and it starts 10ft outside your door.
The people of Tilting, as elsewhere in remote parts of Canada, look out for each other in a constant and material way. The hospitality is astonishing, the values so communal they seem almost Scandinavian.
These people consider the best part of themselves to be Irish – who am I to suggest that it might actually be Canadian? Besides, this isn’t Canada. It isn’t even Newfoundland.
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https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-...orld-1.1538579
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Note to self: "The plural of anecdote is not evidence."
Last edited by SignalHillHiker; Mar 20, 2020 at 4:44 PM.
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