It happened on Sunday as we walked across Clapham Common towards the Old Town. My 10-year-old daughter asked if we might go to a shop to get something called a \u201cbaw-tool of wah-taah\u201d.<\/p>\n
I stopped dead in my tracks.<\/p>\n
\u201cA what?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cA baw-tool of wah-taah. Dad, I\u2019m thuh-stee,\u201d she said, raising the intonation on the final word as if asking me a disbelieving question. <\/p>\n
Stupid Dad. Is he deaf?<\/p>\n
My mouth drew the grin of a smug Irish father who had just been handed fresh ammunition to tease his tweenage girl. After her 2\u00bd years here, she was actually speaking in a halfway-posh London<\/a> accent.<\/p>\n I had heard subtle shifts before in the speech patterns of my daughters. Tiny inflections here, little shifts in vocabulary there. Usually it was when they were talking around their new school friends. Understandable, I thought, they just want to fit in.<\/p>\n Then one day, the youngest asked if I\u2019d reach up to the high \u201ccupboard\u201d to get her a glass. \u201cIt\u2019s a press,\u201d I shot back. \u201cDaaaaaad!\u201d she said, rolling her eyes. She must have wanted wah-taah.<\/p>\n Now here she was on Sunday, walking in one of London\u2019s most famous parks and speaking to her Wicklow<\/a> father as if she had been born 500 yards away. I wasn\u2019t about to let the opportunity slide. I ribbed her mercilessly.<\/p>\n \u201cWell how would you say it?\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cA bottle of water.\u201d<\/p>\n My daughter, who was born in the Coombe and lived three quarters of her life in Dublin<\/a>, ran off across the park while imitating my accent: \u201cWaaa-tur! Waaa-tur! Waaa-tur!\u201d<\/p>\n Accents can be sensitive for the Irish in Britain. A few of the long-term Irish expatriates whom I know living here jokingly bemoan their children\u2019s English accents. I\u2019ve always enjoyed hearing this as a facetious in-joke. In Ireland<\/a>, we know that the definition of self-deprecation extends to slagging off your own family.<\/p>\n Some other long-term Irish expatriates get understandably exasperated by all of this. \u201cWhat\u2019s wrong with my children having English accents? They are English, after all. There\u2019s nothing wrong with that,\u201d some will say, half-defensively.<\/p>\n And, of course, they are right. Their children are English and, despite our occasional historical hang-ups about the place, England remains one of the most charming nations on earth. But while their kids are English, they are also half-Irish. I reckon they ought to be able to take a good slagging.<\/p>\n The sensitivity can manifest in a different, more serious way among Irish adults born and raised in Britain<\/a> who identify more closely with the culture of their parents\u2019 land. They feel Irish, are Irish, but just have English accents.<\/p>\n Among this cohort there is little fondness in their recollections of being teased by homegrown Irish for the way that they speak. For them, it could be hurtful.<\/p>\n Author Morag Prunty, who writes as Kate Kerrigan, speaks eloquently of how she felt othered when she moved from London, where she was raised, back to her ancestral home of Mayo<\/a>. Her accent was part of it.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is kind of a derision in it,\u201d she once told me as we sipped tea in the back garden of the Hendon house where she was brought up in north London. Despite feeling as Irish as anyone, Prunty often felt the sting of disapproval over the way she spoke.<\/p>\n I asked her why she thought this was.<\/p>\n \u201cBecause it\u2019s England.\u201d<\/p>\n