Mayo people have a lot in common with northside Dubs

This is the week when we talk and think about national identity. It has put me in mind of something I’ve been wondering about for a while: Are people in Dublin and the west of Ireland all that different?

The smaller the country, the more fiercely people can cling to regional differences, and we certainly talk up those differences between the west and the capital all the time. Rural Ireland, urban Ireland, two different worlds. But I have lived for a long time in both places, and in my experience, there are more similarities than differences between many Dubs and west of Ireland people, especially in attitudes.

I say ‘many Dubs’, but of course I really mean northside Dubliners. That’s the crowd who remind me of west of Ireland people, ignoring surface level stuff like accent. They share the most important element of identity in common: both think of themselves as outsiders, defining themselves in contrast to the privileged.

That is the stuff that makes people what they are. It can manifest as a chip on the shoulder or in ferocious energy to succeed, and often both at the same time. In 30 years up here, it is something I notice all the time. Ask any of your relations who went to a Dublin college or worked in the city about the northsiders they met and they will report this phenomenon: restless energy and a determination to do better than those who went before. West of Ireland people don’t need a mirror to recognise that.

In that shared mindset, the view is that the privileged don’t need that same drive to make it: they made it the day they were born and walk around this world with doors opening ahead of them. And as that kind of privilege is the thing west of Ireland people and northside Dubs define themselves against, there follows another similarity. Even if they have now done well, with plenty of money, no troubles and a big house, few west of Ireland people and few northside Dubs will ever consider themselves privileged. You don’t grow into or ever achieve privilege. No, no, the outsider will always be an outsider.

Instead, they put themselves into that most valued of categories in both parts of the world – the ‘done well’. That means they have achieved despite their lack of advantage. Whereas the privileged, with all the advantages stacked in their favour, might be doing well, but they have not done well.

Because if you do make it as a northsider or as a west of Ireland person, you have done it in opposition to that privileged crowd. Northside lads I have been friendly with over the years laugh at the idea of them being privileged. They worked all the harder to achieve, to get their first class honours degree, or to make the euros to buy their first place. Deep in their bones, they feel their achievements were harder earned.

That is a vital – indeed the crucial – distinction. The nature of achievement is defined by whether you did it with or without the silver spoon. That understanding and shared views unites friends of mine, whether they are from Mayo or northside Dubliners – or indeed from anywhere that privilege is hard found.

It is in identifying where that privilege is found that there can be misunderstanding. When west of Ireland people say ‘Dublin’ dismissively, it conveys all of that dislike of a place with people who get things handed to them and don’t even know it. The pampered centre. The home of the elite. The forum for decisions that forgets the west. And even worse: as a place where information could be sent that would work against your interest. It’s like the English never fully left and the west remains partly colonised by a 21st-century Dublin Castle. ‘Dublin’ is all those things for west of Ireland people today.

And most regular Dublin people recognise those sentiments and that place, but they have a different name for the pampered centre, the place of the elite and of all the decisions, and they definitely don’t think they live in it. That’s not ‘Dublin’ they would say: that’s the 'Southside', and very particular areas in that southside thank you very much. That is where the ‘in’ crowd are. If you had your rural head on you and still insisted that you meant them, they would think you were trying to make an eejit out of them. Northside Dubs don’t like people who try and make eejits out of them any more than ourselves. And being a northsider in Dublin is a real identity, and they won’t thank you for lumping them in with that crowd in the fancier spots over the river.

So who are these privileged people haunting the imagination of northsiders and west of Ireland people? Once upon a time the ‘privileged’ were people who lived in the Big House or got the rent from your tenement. Later it became the small cohort of people who had university education. Now it is people who live in a world where the troubles of people in the rest of the country - and city - are a curiosity, rather than an experience.

The young people have their own version of this now. When they want to say someone is privileged, they call them a ‘nepo baby’ meaning they got what they got through nepotism, by having what west of Ireland people have long called ‘pull’.

People in the west and northsiders don’t think they have much ‘pull’ and they certainly think they don’t get a fair shake. They note how things always look shinier and nicer and more expensive on the southside. But here perhaps is one area where there is some difference, and it is to our advantage. When those northsiders come down west and they look around at everything we have on our doorstep, they do sometimes wonder what all the complaining is about, especially when we don’t even have worse weather anymore. Being born here has its own advantages - a privilege in its own way, you might say.