Tipperary facing discrimination because of the way we speak!

LOOK here, readers, isn’t it about time that we all stopped trying to talk posh and put our considerable vocal powers instead behind our own Tipperary accent.

Regional accents are cool now, I’m told and, in some cases, are becoming a bit of a game changer for job applicants. Sadly, it looks as if Tipperary people may need a quota system to compete with their sexier sounding competitors. We’re too flat, apparently, to make much of an impression in this falsetto obsessed society.

The Limerick accent, for instance, came fourth in a recent on-line survey of the sexiest voices in Ireland, which is a source of great angst to me seeing that the Tipperary accent only ranked a miserable 13th.

Now, although I spent all my life in both counties, I never noticed any difference between the two tongues until the Rubberbandits came on the scene and wrecked my eardrums. Be that as it may, Tipperary is now at a major disadvantage and threatened with discrimination because of the way we speak.

It’s no longer who you are, where you come from or who you know when you’re job hunting. It’s how you sound, and the Tipperary accent has been judged as ‘too flat’ to be sexy. There’s a lilt in the LImerick air apparently that becomes less mellifluous the closer you come to the Slieve Felim hills and the Glen of Aherlow. And there was I thinking that there was nothing between us only the hurling.

Great! It wasn’t as if I didn’t have an inferiority complex already about what I considered (with apologies to Kavanagh) my ‘thick tongued mumble”. Throughout my life, all attempts to talk posh fell . . . you’ve guessed it . . . dead flat the minute I opened my mouth. And it wasn’t for want of trying.

It didn’t matter at school when we were all flat – apart from the musically gifted who sounded slightly hysterical when they got excited. But the minute I got a job in the County Council, I realised that, even before I conquered the complex task of translating planning application forms into Irish, I’d have to master telephone-speak. It took me the bones of four years before I could even manage to sound friendly on the line.

Then, by a sheer fluke, I became the first secretary of North Tipperary An Taisce, where nearly everyone on the committee spoke Anglo-Irish. There was nothing for it but to say as little as possible, but once, when I did have to utter something, the chairman at the time, the late Brigadier W.S. Hickie, a kindly old gentleman, who had won great acclaim for his part in the war, turned to me and said in rich plummy tones that slowly rose to a crescendo: “Say that again!”

Years later in Chicago, when I was introduced to a horde of long-lost relations whose ancestors had emigrated from the Slieve Felim hills to work in the city’s stockyards nearly a century earlier, I overheard a chance remark from one distant cousin to another that almost reduced me to tears. “Hasn’t she a wonderful brogue?” she said. Then she compounded the insult by asking me if we still had dirt floors in our houses back in the old sod.

But now it seems, regional accents are coming into their own and even a Tipperary accent is far superior to a Dublin 4 accent, according to that recent poll which declared ‘South Dublin speak’ the hardest on the ear. Limerick was fourth in the list of the most acceptable accents. Ironically, in a counter poll, citing the worst accents in the country, Limerick came sixth. Maybe as Micheal Martin says, you should never pay too much heed to the polls.

The trouble is that, like every other accent on this little island, the Tipperary accent is not homogenous. I have a soft spot for the South Tipperary accent because it reminds me of the first novel I ever read. That, I would imagine, is how they talked in ‘Knocknagow’. My favourite, however, is the Nenagh accent. But outside of the town of Nenagh, nobody in Tipperary speaks the Nenagh accent or calls the town Naynagh, as we all did in our thick-tongued youth.

Poll respondents described the Kerry accent as like a ‘soft breeze’- except when Danny Healy Ray speaks - and the Clare voice as being ‘loud’ and Roscommon as being ‘ poetic’. Tipperary, they said was “flat, but inoffensive” with very little “pulling power”.

Time to voice our concerns then, isn’t it?