Wales is like Ireland should/could have been

Wales is one quarter the area of the island of Ireland.

I think generally that Wales was subdued a very long time ago and given their proximity to England they couldn't hope to escape. So they concentrated on cutlural independence in those areas that were not overrun by English. In Ireland, we are surrounded by water, we never really resigned ourselves to being run by the English. The consequences of this struggle for freedom were more severe and the Act of Union and the Famine dealt the language a fatal blow. But most of Ireland did escape the malign influence of London and achieved the economic growth that is missing in Wales.

Lived in N Wales for 4 years. It's true that you hear Welsh every day but that isn't true for the rest of the country. As for public amenities I wouldn't say they're any better than Ireland.

One thing that was glaringly obvious was the amount of the population who were deprived. There seemed to be a lot more of the population who you could class as being poor. All-in-all Ireland has a lot more going for it.

The Welsh are lovely though and I have great time for them. A lot in North Wales would love independence but accept rightly or wrongly that it's not feasible. The English are not well liked at all but they don't seem to have any conviction that they can go it alone which is kind of sad in many ways.

In any case the OP was in Caernarfon and compared it to Ireland. That would be like a tourist going to Westport or Killarney and thinking they were representative of a typical Irish town. Believe me, most of the towns in Wales are grim, full of crap pubs and charity shops.

machaseh, you may not be aware of the exact history but the simplistic explanation of one contributory factor to the language issue is that Britain basically pillaged and raped Ireland for centuries, leaving its people mainly destitute. As a foreigner, you may have heard of the "famine" too (which wasn't a famine so much as a managed genocide ... and there were a few such famines, not just "an gorta mhor"). As a result, the only future people saw for their children was through emigration. This even continued after the foundation of the state and up to the 1990's. If you were in Ireland in the 19th century, it was better for your children to learn and speak English so that when they emigrated they would have a better chance. Over in England or the US or Australia.

If you go to the US you will quickly see evidence of the sheer number Americans claiming Irish heritage. Good luck finding a sizeable Welsh American influence. The Welsh stayed at home. There wasn't the same need to supplant their native language with English.

I never thought of Wales as a country in the same sense of Ireland , or Scotland even. Happy to be apart of England really.

Wales would argue with you on that..

(But it still doesn't mean Twitter is correct)

The joys of living away from suburbs mean, well, you don't have the joys of living in a suburb. Unless you expect Bus Eireann to roam around all the little roads of rural Ireland twice an hour and pick up no-one, stopping at every house & laneway, someone will be unhappy.

From Wikipedia;

[quote]Within Wales, Gwynedd has the highest proportion of speakers of the Welsh language. The greatest concentration of Welsh speakers in Gwynedd is found in and around Caernarfon.[/quote]

It seems the OP went to the Welsh version of the Gaeltacht, and thought that Wales is great. Dear lawd :D

OP - try go to Bangor , Conwy or Holyhead, even in Cardiff go one street back from the main thoroughfare and the place is an utter dump. Wales is not somewhere we should aspire to. Total kip.

@Donald Trump wrote:

It was even more than that though. The Irish were subjugated as inferiors for centuries. English scholars wrote entire textbooks detailing why the Irish were an inferior race; stupider, slower and less attractive than the English. These were intended as serious scientific texts, claiming it was all down to the nature of the Irish. Echoes of this hate still exist today. "A bit Irish" is a common phrase still used in England to describe something that's shoddy or chaotic.

When you have full control over a nation and can teach it to hate itself, then it does. Inferiority is so embedded in the Irish psyche that it emerges everywhere. We laugh about Irish begrudgery and tutting about people getting "above their station", but this is a vestige of it. Irish people were taught that they're sh1t, and any Irish person attempting to better themselves was just a fool with fool's notions. Know your place, and stay in it.

Since the foundation of the state, people believed that things in England, in general were of superior quality. That British companies were more honourable and sturdy than Irish ones. That Westminster was a refined and mature political forum where smart decisions were made, while the Dáil was little more than a bunch of uneducated farmers running a banana republic. I know many older Irish people still think like this.

And this is another reason why Irish was discarded. Not just because English was of more practical use, but because being able to speak Irish was seen as a sign of an inferior. Like teaching your children to speak monkey language to talk to monkeys. You didn't want your kids to be able to speak Irish, because it was the language of simpletons and savages.

Welsh never had the same stigmas attached to it.

I've been to Wales a few times and found it to be incredibly grim. It is most definitely not somewhere Ireland should aspire to be.

Although I was quite surprised at the amount of people speaking Welsh which was nice. I used to go out with a girl from Colwyn Bay which has one of the highest levels of spoken Welsh.

But in many parts of Wales, Welsh is simply the main spoken language of the area. Infants will pick it up because it is the language parents speak to each other and other members of the family. It is not because it is taught in school. It is the first language of children in the area before they even go to school.

i never heard them speaking Welsh. Are you sure they weren’t speaking English with their thick Welsh accent?? It can be very difficult to understand when they talk amongst themselves.

Ah Wales.... The Connacht of England

I think this thread is the worst trolling in Boards history.