22/01/2026
“How Irish are you allowed to be if your first accent was English?”
Growing up with Irish parents and sounding like a Londoner is a strange clash of identity understanding. The BBC last year wrote an interesting article about how being culturally Irish can be messy and often scrutinised, especially for those of us in the diaspora.
There’s an undercover judgement some people place on you, do you know your GAA, can you drop a ‘grand’, ‘craic’ and mix with a ‘geezer’ in a sentence and not make it sound out of place and trying too hard to fit in?
There can also be a strange confusion where music stars like Noel and Liam Gallagher, the Beatles and Ed Sheeran are happily accepted as having Irish ancestry, but when they attempt to associate themselves more with it, they aren’t fully accepted and get put in a strange limbo space of being either English, Irish or even neither.
With Ed Sheeran, he has specifically talked about identifying as culturally Irish, and the article lists him as one of the figures who muddy the waters even more. When Ed says he’s culturally Irish, "I can be allowed to feel a connection to a place half my family is from," people roll their eyes and think the only thing Irish about him is his red head, or say, ‘he’s Irish when it suits him’.
It shows an evolution where Irishness now lives on abroad as much in people's memories, music and family WhatsApp groups as it does in the soil of the Emerald Isle.
My show too, lives right in that awkward space. A little too Irish for here, a bit too English for there, and never quite sure who’s allowed to hand out the ‘proper Irish’ framed certificates.
What makes you properly Irish (or properly anything)?
Your accent, your passport, your pale skin and quick sunburn on holiday, or being an insider and an outsider simultaneously?
Ed Sheeran grew up in England but described himself as 'culturally Irish,' prompting debate about what that really means
