Social Classes In Ireland...

Has anyone ever had to deal with a 'friend' who frowns on you for 'dealing with' people of 'lower types'?

[Lots of generalisations in there, but I'm sure it will make sense for someone!]

Due to the nature of the community work I am heavily involved with I am on first name terms with many people who would be considered among the 'lower classes'. All this is done while being a successful professional person to pay the bills. I have, in the past few years, begun to note the disbelief and surprise on certain acquaintances faces when we might meet someone who they would look down on while I am sharing a joke with them and chatting to them without any other thought than genuinely being interested in how they are doing.

This became rampant during the tiger years, but is persisting.

Rubik. wrote: »

Market reseachers use a classification based on the occupation of the head of household, ABC1's...etc. There is a table here with the class definitions and the percentage of the Irish population that make up the different classes....

http://www.pfizer.ie/in_the_news.cfm?action=showArticle&articleID=75

That's a good table. It's a pity Pfizer had to include people reliant on state benefits as "working class" as it skews the figures somewhat.

Personally I think there's;
homeless and some unemployed,
Then a "working class", incorporating much of the unemployed as well as those in low level employment and travellers.
Then two tiers of middle class, roughly those who profited from the boom but not education, and those who would have been middle class anyway.
An upper class made up of people with high education, position, and a decent amount of disposable income.
Then another upper class incorporating some of our bigger entrepreneurs and those high in the food chain of multinationals.
Then the mega wealthy.

However I don't see these classifications as mutually exclusive, if you could graph it it would be some sort of confused venn diagram. The working class merges into the lower middle, which runs almost in parallel with the other middle class, who have much in common with the lower end of high society and so on so forth.

Career criminals in Ireland usually come from working class backgrounds, they don't avail of education and don't have the mannerisms of the other groupings, therefore they are still working class.

Working class doesn't just mean people that work. Generally it means people who physically labour, rather than at a desk, and in our society the working class does include the unemployed. For example, Dublin's north side would be viewed as a working class area but unemployment rates are above the national average.

Zascar wrote: »

A persons accent also as a lot to do with it. I find it funny how in certain other countries you cannot tell a personal class by their accent, only perhaps by where they are from, urban or rural etc. In Ireland it is far, far more evident.

You just know the accents here. My Italian is appalling so the only accents I can hear are north and south, but my dad can tell you what area of what city they came from. Just like where we hear a tallaght accent someone with minimal knowledge of the country will hear a Dublin accent and someone with no knowledge whatsoever will hear an Irish accent. The Irish person then associates the tallaght accent with the working classes.
However I don't think you're talking about accent, I think your talking about how well spoken a person is. Most people don't realise I'm a midlander, they think I'm from South Dublin or Wicklow, they also assume a posh childhood. Its simply because I can pronounce "th" and have a decent vocabulary, that stems from being well read. The higher you climb up the social ladder, the more likely emphasis will be put on education, the better read people are, the better spoken they are. Its not an accent per se, more a manner of speech. And this is evident across the globe.

You do realise the thread is half a year old?