Do you consider yourself european?

karma_ wrote: »

No what?

You don't consider yourself to be something that you indisputably are?

This place is becoming like a UKIP convention center.

The OP was..."Do you consider yourself european?"

What part of my answer did you not comprehend?

You may consider yourself European, I however do not.

I am Irish & indisputably have no allegiance to Europe as far as I'm concerned, no matter how much it písses you off.

RobertKK wrote: »

Genetically most Irish can be traced to where we came from...northern Spain.

topper75 wrote: »

Grew up out of the ground there did we?

Keep on keeping south!

Southern Spain...?

DeadHand wrote: »

The Dub and the Leitrimite would very likely speak the same language, play the same sports, eat the same foods, listen to the same music, read the same books, watch the same television, experienced the same rituals growing up, would know someone roughly from the other's locality unless either were recent arrivals.

Not a very good argument really.

Sports, no; the emphasis on sports is quite different between Dublin and non-Dublin - a Dublin lad is far more likely to be playing Rugby that the lad from Leitrim.

And food, please - I suppose Supermacs is big in Dublin?

As to rituals growing up, I can attest to them not being the same having gone to school down the country and coming from Dublin. How many Dubs will have experienced harvest festivals, 'hops' or hare coursing?

Television? Sure, we're all watching the UK channels. Indeed, ignoring for a moment that regional accents and vocabulary can vary greatly even within a country as small as Ireland (sure, you'd have to be a queer fella not to know that) your point about language might lead one to conclude that we might as well be British.

This is not to say that your Dub and Culchie have no commonality, but your'e also underestimating regional differences and overlooking that much of that commonality has nothing to do with being from the same country.

Put your hypothetical Damo in a room with a lad from Carrick on Shannon and a lad from Palermo and see who he clicks with first. It won't be Ciro from Sicily.

Not as simple as that - unless both parties are illiterate, I suppose. One of the things that the Internet has allowed us to experience is that we tend to have more in common with those with similar educational backgrounds than any kind of national affiliation. As long as there is a common language, then your hypothetical Damo in a room with a lad from Carrick on Shannon probably won't have much in common with each other, especially if the latter has a degree and Damo left school at 16. And if Ciro from Sicily has a similar level of education to our lad from Carrick on Shannon, they're far more likely to hit it off.

Try living abroad for a few years and you'll quickly realize that the same passport does not mean you have much in common with someone else.

But most of all is the stupid notion that there's some sort of homogeneous pan-European culture to measure against. That a German is the same as a Greek or a Slovakian or an Italian. Or even that we have to be exactly the same.

Truth is, take away the common language and you'll probably find that American culture is quite a bit further away from ours than French culture would be.

Sometimes when I'm eating croissants having a little tete-a-tete with my wife (who's a real femme fatale) beside me wearing her lingerie, I'll get swepped up in the zeitgeist and feel a real espirit de corps with my fellow Europeans and actually feel like a real bona fide European myself.

I thought the OP was pretty clear, that we are given geographic reasons but that was expanded on (by and by where are Europe's eastern borders???).

Interesting how the no/meh answers are really irking some people.