Brand Ireland

[Malbekh]

We are about five million different things -

Wow. Thanks for the response TA, I appreciate the time and effort. Can I point out however, that the issues you seem to have is with our portrayal abroad? I picked brand New Zealand and Ghana for a good reason. Neither of them have been under the colonial foot for 800 years, and neither of them have a diaspora of tens of millions, a lot of whom hanker for the old sod in all its awfulness.

They may hanker over leprechauns and shamrocks, but we - in Ireland - know who we are, and we know that it ain't shamrocks and leprechauns.

[toxic avenger]

Wow. Thanks for the response TA, I appreciate the time and effort. Can I point out however, that the issues you seem to have is with our portrayal abroad?

More our collusion, or at least the collusion by a certain type among us, in our portrayal abroad...

[tonic]

I think it's a good idea, we're generally well regarded in these places and anything we can do, within limits, to remind them we're still here, for holidays, for business, for living, has to be to our benefit.

What are we?
You only have to read any page on any subject here to see we're all sorts of things, some if not most, nothing to be very proud of.

What we have is a fantastic little country, well placed and well endowed by nature to provide a good standard of living for all who are willing to sail her. What we have to do is pick ourselves up, learn lessons and get on with realising as near as possible our full potential.

[greenporcupine]

I think it's a good idea, we're generally well regarded in these places and anything we can do, within limits, to remind them we're still here, for holidays, for business, for living, has to be to our benefit.

What are we?
You only have to read any page on any subject here to see we're all sorts of things, some if not most, nothing to be very proud of.

What we have is a fantastic little country, well placed and well endowed by nature to provide a good standard of living for all who are willing to sail her. What we have to do is pick ourselves up, learn lessons and get on with realising as near as possible our full potential.

And please speak a little Irish for the French.
Don't you realise that what the English and the Scots and the French too have lost is the sense of exaggeration, lies mixed with truth that was the hallmark of the storyteller.
Life cannot be tolerated if it is too 'real' it needs fantasy,and that is all right.
My mother's life in Roscommon was unimaginatively hard,their hands were large from work work. But my God could she tell a story like no one else.
This is what the 'furiners' want,please give it to them they need it ,life with frills ,green ones.
OH and it is GODS colour too ,not just Ireland's.
They think you are generous ,brave ,and have great music ,songs.
Is it all a lie ?

[greenporcupine]

I completely agree with you. The nation has literally sold its sold, Brand Ireland is probably a more apt name than the Republic of Ireland, but people should be ashamed to use it. We aren't Irish people anymore, we're purses/wallets on legs and those in charge want us to continue to consume crap in between regular visits to the pub.

That is an hilarious image,had me laughing for ages,but too true !!

[Mitsui2]

There is a poetic beauty in your writing when you go all "stream of consciousness", TA.
Great stuff. You're certainly on form tonight.

I'll happily second that. And also note that much in TAs post set little bells of recognition going in my head.

[gatsbygirl20]

I wouldn't mind if we were portrayed as something close to what we are (or at least to what we were). But we never are. And I don't view New Zealand or Ghana as brands, I view them as countries. The only people who talk of these things are people who dress in photocopier salesman suits and talk in clichés or overworn managementspeak gibberish because that's all their second-class minds can cope with whilst simultaneously trying to speak in that self-loathing trans-Atlantic abomination of an accent they use and also hoping that no-one notices the trail of greasiness they leave behind them as they scurry around pushing their filthy wares on people too vacuous and materialistic to recognise common-or-garden vermin when they see it.

Brilliant, TA. Pure brilliant. You are mighty riled about Paddy-fakery and these marketing guys, for some reason, ( childhood trauma with a leprechaun in a Hugo Boss suit?) and eloquence flows in a stream of consciousness from your keyboard.

Mind you, those photocopier-suited guys spouting management-speak, sound a lot like the posters on P.ie. I thought they were the great educated, economically-savvy tribe who would rid the land of those incompetent teacher, social worker and solicitor politicians, who know not a word of management speak, and are, for this reason, totally incapable of pulling us out of the mire..

As regards the fake-tourist thing. I was once at a performance of Riverdance and a thought occurred to me. Patrick Kavanagh (a natural for P.ie, if ever there was one) had a bitter, eloquent hatred of the fake-Irishry, diddly-eye or misty Celtic poet sham-rockery...
He called it "The National Bucklep"
As I watched the leppin' lassies of Riverdance intercut with codology about our emigrant history, I thought ....This is it. This is Kavanagh's "National Bucklep" come to fruition......

[Pauli]

More our collusion, or at least the collusion by a certain type among us, in our portrayal abroad...

A lot of what you have to say on this so far TA has me scrambling to remember the texts of songs by Arthur Riordan in his alter-ego as MC Dev in a work of his from the 80s. One song, "Eire 2016 AD", would appeal to you with lines like

" ....a Disneyscape of fake round towers,
where Robopriest has special powers"

and

".. these things we cherish on our island paradise
the Lotto numbers, the unborn child and private enterprise"

This work of Arthur's deserves to be given a wider audience and if anybody can give any pointers on how to access it, feel free to contribute. I believe it was called "The Emergency Sessions". It is extremely relevant to the Ireland of today.

[Fraxinus_]

We are about five million different things - living in different environments, having different worldviews, different interests. What we're NOT are arran-wearing morons who stand by horses in fields while ethereal pseudo-Celtic fakeyness plays around us, before heading to fakey pubs where everyone is smiling and playing bodhráns and whistles. Or at least I'm not. Nor were we ever. My grandparents were rural north-west Ireland, were relatively content but lived in grinding poverty where every day was a struggle. One grandfather was in the IRA, interned during the Civil War, became embittered about what happened, and what became of the country he fought for. My parents grew up with nothing and had to emigrate in their teens, in those days almost a bereavement. The local TDs were part of a new aristocracy, dynasties abounded. The doctors and the priests were too good, in many cases, to talk to you because you were beneath them. The country is partitioned and a large section cut off from the rest of us. People now are more materialistic (and some materialism is a good thing, better than the poverty of before) but to the point of it being a new religion, out-of-town shopping centres being the new cathedrals. Television and popular music are very influential, more often than not inane and mediocre, sometimes downright offensive. There are many young people here with bright minds and ability, and they have to leave, as it always was. Going out at night usually involves trying to avoid talking to the acne-ridden, rat-faced morons who need to kick off for no reason whatsoever when they're not vomiting the two bottles of some dyed-blue 'alcoholic' piss they had drunk too fast. When you go to the shop you get ripped off, everyone rips everyone else off here, and if you have the temerity to react by going across the border to shop you're accused of being 'unpatriotic' (going to Newry or Derry, ffs, as if it's France) by the same f*ckers who couldn't give a stuff about patriotism when they were charging us double what our neighbours were paying. Our politicians and bankers play the same game, and we re-elect them, despite the fact that they connived in what was effectively a giant criminal conspiracy against us for the last ten to twenty years. That is Ireland.

I doubt any of that'll be stuck on the tourist adverts... I'm not saying it should be. I just don't like the fact that the government, through these marketing parasite types, then has us portrayed abroad as caricatures, as loveable simpletons, which I take as a complete p1ss-take and almost treacherous. I would simply prefer we were portrayed as something closer to what we are - normal human beings with flaws and graces like anyone else. But what we certainly aren't is a 'brand'. That's just pure, scum-sucking, twisted, self-loathing, moronic, witless evil...

Green rep! Great post!

[fionnmccool]

Its' a festival, a holiday and a global event. No festival focusing on the warts could ever have a hope of being so globally popular. Nobody wants to buy into a festival which is gloomy and focuses on the warts and worst aspects. It's about popularity. Its' about what we can do to cheer up patrons of the festival. We shouldn't take ourselves so seriously on St Patrick's day. We have serious issues in this country but tearing St Patrick's day apart would be an own goal. Those who's interest in Ireland is sparked by an awareness of the St Patrick's festival can intelligently choose to find out more or else we actually got some awareness of our existence or brand across in the right form or presentation for those who otherwise wouldn't buy into or be interested in anything else.
We have 364 other days in the year to get across who we really are. If we cant manage that then maybe theres no point. In a competitive world of short attention spans where people just dont' care and some cant even place their own country on the map, St Patrick's day gets our foot in the door. We can dwell on stereotypes and whinge about it or we can use this foothold of Irish awareness to tell the rest of the Irish story. I think it's quite cool that for a tiny country which should be insignificant and anonymous we actually are not especially on St Patricks' day. We have to do the best we can with what we have.