Talk:Anglo-Irish people

message: About the Duke of Wellington being "Anglo-Irish"...  Didn't he say, "being born in  a stable doesn't make one a horse"?
:He did - but given that his father was created an Irish Peer, and he himself was a member of the Irish House of Commons, as well as being born in Dublin, the evidence seems to be there.  --Henrygb 12:22, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: That is because Anglo-Irish is a slur. K00la1dx (talk) 04:27, 27 October 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Definition of "Anglo-Irish" 

message: I think he was born near Listowel alright, his father was working there, but I don't know that he ever considered himself Irish or Anglo-Irish.
Do you have references that he did?
I believe he happened to habve been born in Ireland but his family had English estates that they spent much time at.
I may be wrong but the term 'happened to be born in Ireland' would apply much more to him than to Arthur son of Garret Earl of Morningside (with his ancestory from 'old English' and Irish, as well as Elizabethan immigrants)
:After looking into the matter I've concluded that Kitchener was in every sense English, except that he happened to have been born in Ireland in his parents's home there.  He had no ties to Ireland or to Irish culture, which should be a defining characteristic of the Anglo-Irish class.  I'm therefore going to remove him.  -- Eb.hoop 04:06, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: You'd have to read this book from 2016 - https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/kitchener-enigma-trevor-royle/1123535644 - to change your mind.78.16.8.93 (talk) 19:26, 26 September 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: What about Kitchener

message: I thought I more or less knew what Anglo-Irish meant. However a recent discussion at Talk:George Gabriel Stokes has prompted me look at bit further. The dictionaries I have at hand suggest the defining of the word may be recent more recent than I previously suspected:
The Chambers 20th Century Dictionary (1901) does not have the word
The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1955) does not have the word.
The Concise Oxford Dictionary (1995) has:
* of English descent but born or resident in Ireland
* of mixed English and Irish parentage
* of or belonging to Britain and the Republic of Ireland
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language (2000) says:
* A native of England living in Ireland.
* A native of Ireland living in England. 
* A person of mixed Irish and English ancestry.
Note that the COD and the American Heritage each have one defintion not in the other. A wider sample of the opinions of modern dictionary writers would be useful. 
Now of course WP records individual editors' opinions over such matters. I was amused to find in the edits of Cecil Day-Lewis that he spent several years in WP as a British poet, then rapidly moved in the space of a few edits as follows: 
*6 July 2005 - Anglo-Irish
*4 Sept 2005 - Irish
*30 Sept 2005 - English
And English he has remained since! To confuse matters still further, his son, Daniel Day-Lewis, WP now classifies as English/Irish.
My interest in this is in writing biographical articles. The problem mainly arises in the opening paragraph where the Wikipedia:Manual of Style (biographies) calls for the person's nationality to be given saying, In the normal case this will mean the country of which the person is a citizen or national, or was a citizen when the person became notable.
The difficulties over the concept of citizenship when writing biography for people born in Ireland and who moved around, and incidentally also for natives of Scotland and Wales, suggest to me that some further guideline is needed. My preferred solution, so far, is to avoid the possible confusion of the term Anglo-Irish, and to state in a few more words both where they were born or native and where they were notable. 
I thought this would be a useful place for a debate, since the term Anglo-Irish is at the core of the matter. ( Addition: I have just found  is a more general debate in progress at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (biographies)- please either join that or else comment here for the Anglo-Irish question -- Op. Deo)
-- Op. Deo 20:17, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with you about the nationality in the first sentence. A great place for chauvinistic POV. However, my understanding of Anglo-Irish means Irish with Anglo characteristics, in other words as Brendan Behan would have it a Protestant upper middle or upper class Irishman who sounds more English than the English. It is a term that has gone out of use in modern Ireland but it is useful historically. Incidentally how would you describe someone whose family were Protestant Irish professionals from Dublin but who was born in the (British) Indian Empire, educated in Ireland and England and served in the (British) Indian Army up to a general, before retiring to England? Is he Indian because of his birth, or Indian because that was where he became notable? He called himself Irish or Anglo-Irish. Dabbler 21:16, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Ok, I will rise to the challenge. How about: came from an Irish family and served with the British Army in India. or shorter if you can draft it so. At least he is not Anglo-Indian : ) -- Op. Deo 21:44, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

text: I don't see it as a technical term, but as journalist's short-hand. Ascendancy is a useful term with deep historical roots - as in protestant ascendancy - but doesn't cover the same ground. The Wikipedia entry for Ascendancy sounds familiar: a computer game with the theme of an "alien species in a galactic struggle to become the dominant life force".--shtove 17:30, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  The problem with the term is that we are trying to shoehorn a modern notion of nationhood into a largely historical context where it didn't exist. That is to say we now broadly accept birth = nationhood except where it is resigned for citizenship of another country. However that wouldn't have been understood as such even as late at C19. To take the example atop this article - Wellington - he was born in Ireland of a family than had left England 300 years previously. Yet not one name on their pedigree is Irish they are all either British or fellow 'expats'. They lived parallel lives to the Irish, in the same country but never the same culture. They usually considered themselves British or English, though they were often treated in England as second class subjects not Irish but not quite English either. For example Wellington's brother was furious when he was offered an Irish - not British - marquisate...calling it a 'gilt edged potato' (iirc) and stating that there had been nothing Irish in his conduct. The above comparison with India is apposite, you have the same situation of soldiers/administrators serving sometimes settling yet generations on not really changing their sense of who they were. I'm not saying the term can't be used but I'm wary that in using it we give a sense of a simple explantion for a very complex notionAlci12 17:08, 27 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: You say of Wellington - "Wellington - he was born in Ireland of a family than had left England 300 years previously" - yet one of his many ancestors was Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, the rebel of the 1590s. The Anglo-Irish were mostly a mixture, and this is beyond rational debate today.78.16.8.93 (talk) 19:34, 26 September 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Biographies of people born in Ireland 

message: I don't think Anglo-Irish Relations should redirect here, it's a completely different issue --Falcon9x5 18:47, 26 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed. I have removed the redirect link. -- Op. Deo 18:59, 27 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Anglo-Irish Relation

message: The Anglo-Irish were also represented among the senior officers of the British Army by men such as Field Marshal Lord Roberts, first honorary Colonel of the Irish Guards regiment, who spent most of his career in India, and Field Marshal Lord Gough who served under Wellington in the Peninsular War before rising to prominence by commanding the British army fighting the first Opium War in China. 
:Er...so we have Roberts and Gough.  But, um...there's somebody else...possibly mentioned in this paragraph...can't quite place it....
:I'd like to add Wellington, but the current way it's written makes it difficult.  I thought I'd at least ask if there's some reason not to include him as Anglo-Irish. john k 01:23, 20 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The whole point about the Anglo-Irish was that they were Irish, but they were also Protestant, upper class or upper middle class and sometimes educated at Eton or other English schools and universities. As such they tended to blend in with the equivalent English class and may have been seen as the same by others. On the other hand, many of them, unlike Wellington, were also fervent Irish patriots who sided with the Irish independence movements of their day. Dabbler 16:29, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Is somebody missing here? 

message: I agree with Dabbler and this comes through in various books, eg Somerville and Ross's "The Real Charlotte", Elizabeth Bowen's "The Last September" and Dermot Bolger's "The Family on Paradise Pier". And yes, of course the Anglo-Irish included many fervent Irish patriots, Countess Markievicz (Constance Gore-Booth) for a start, not to mention "The Uncrowned King of Ireland", Charles Stewart Parnell Bill Tegner 09:45, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Literary References 

message: How come English people of Irish heritage,Neol and Liam Gallacher, John Lennon ect are not described as Hiberno-British on wiki? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 89.101.222.28 (talk) 16:30, 4 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Well, citizens of the Republic aren't modified to Anglo-Irish simply because their surname is Brown or Smith.  Anglo-Irish clearly means/has meant many things - today I take it to mean people equally at home in London or Dublin during their lifetimes. Hakluyt bean 23:21, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hiberno-British equivelent. 

message: The so-called Anglo-Irish mostly considered themselves to be Irish and were considered by the English to be Irish.  The term smacks of retrospective Celtic nationalism. Why are not the present day mostly English speaking Irish also not considered Anglo-Irish? Colin4C 20:51, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Anglo-Irish people were more of a social class than a linguistic division. The term has gone out of use partly because the class differential has mostly gone and also it isn't fashionable in Ireland to be linked closely to the British. Dabbler 21:51, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

text: It was an elite thing, people like William Conolly were Irish-Irish, but he was welcomed by them as he was clever and rich.86.42.203.244 (talk) 22:01, 2 March 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Seems that Conolly was typically Anglo-Irish in that he was a Protestant Irishman (son of a convert, many Anglo-Irish descended from converts) who adapted to the the British rule by becoming close to them. Dabbler (talk) 14:47, 3 March 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Point being Conolly's parents were not Protestant immigrants but as natively Irish as anyone can ever be. And what about William Monsell, 1st Baron Emly who was Anglo-Irish and converted to Catholicism while staying loyal; so many interesting exceptions to the rule.86.42.222.120 (talk) 21:21, 12 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Anglo-Irish were Irish 

message: To give you an opinion of an outsider looking in (i.e. American), I read this article, and I'm still as to what "Anglo-Irish" is.  Is it just a social class, an ethnicity?  Is is English immigrants to Ireland that took on part of the culture of Ireland, or is it native Irish that took on the culture of the English?  Is it a blood thing?  This article doesn't really answer any of these questions as directly as it should, if at all. --Criticalthinker (talk) 07:48, 10 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Definition

message: Anglo-Irish means far more than the Protestant English who settled in Ireland. Numerous English Catholics who moved to Ireland
and intermarried are the first Anglo-Irish. Most of the first Anglo-Irish were from noble English families entering during the
reign of Henry II.
It is in this period that some noble Irish families Anglicized their surnames as a direct result of intermarriage with arriving
English families. For instance: elements of the Seisnan sept intermarried with an English family known as Sexton, and altered
their clan name to O'Sexton. Following the break of the English Church with Rome under Henry VIII, some of the English Sextons in
Ireland, who remained Catholic, altered their surname to Shasnan, a varient of Seisnan. Thus the spelling of surnames flow in both
directions.
Many American families who define themselves as Anglo-Irish are, in fact, Catholic, or still retain a large Catholic element
within their numbers. Although, in America, families of British origin are no longer defined by specific religious affiliations,
the term Anglo-Irish is applied more often by the Catholic elements, as the Protestants generally regard themselves as English.
This data was provided by Jerry Sexton, an American who is an Anglo-Irish Catholic, and whose ancestor came to into the American
colonies from Ireland in 1650.
J.M.A.Sexton
USArmy/USMC/DAV/CWV  —Preceding unsigned comment added by --jmas (talk)
14:40, 29 August 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Like any other combination of words, "Anglo-Irish" means only what people take it to mean.  In recent Irish history, it referred primarily to what this article focuses on: a privileged class of Protestant families that lived in Ireland during British rule, and who had close cultural ties to England (or "Protestants with horses," to use Behan's colorful phrase).  It is a particularly useful term to describe someone like Edmund Burke, whose family background was thoroughly Irish but who was also an Anglican and who spent most of his career in England.  I think that this article is probably not the proper place for an extended discussion of the genealogies of English immigrants to Ireland, whether Catholic or not.  - Eb.hoop (talk) 16:44, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Anglo-Irish update 

message: Was Charles Russell, Baron Russell of Killowen Anglo-Irish? He worked and did not spend much time on horseback, but he was culturally Anglo while also very Irish.86.42.211.155 (talk) 16:24, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: It seems that he shared many of the characteristics of the Anglo-Irish but atypically was of the Catholic faith. I don't know that there is a hard and fast rule. It is probably depends on whether he adopted the group identity or felt himself more Irish or English. Dabbler (talk) 20:32, 2 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Hmm, Russell was in favour of Home Rule, but was also a government minister, a diplomat and supported Charles Stewart Parnell, who was Anglo-Irish if anyone was. The reality of A-I is/was that you are as comfortable in London as in Dublin, regardless of religion, but many Irish people are in that situation today, with cheap travel, the internet and better education.86.42.197.142 (talk) 09:36, 5 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Parnell was Anglo-Irish, of course, but surely being a Parnell supporter is not an indicator that one is Anglo-Irish - Parnell's views were in the minority among his own group, but were widely supported by Catholics.  Although certainly there is ambiguity about many specific people. Look at say, John Redmond - Catholic, nationalist, father's family were Catholic gentry of Hiberno-Norman origin; mother's family were protestant unionist Anglo-Irish.  Is he Anglo-Irish? john k (talk) 07:08, 6 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Again, so many; William Monsell, 1st Baron Emly, Maud Gonne, Charles Bewley, Constance Markievicz, Edward Bulfin, the Earls of Antrim, Sir John Leslie, 2nd Baronet - the list is endless.86.42.222.120 (talk) 21:28, 12 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Catholic Anglo-Irish??

message: Burke is listed here as Anglo-Irish, but he was a bitter critic and opponent of the Protestant Ascendancy and was almost certainly not one of its members.  There seems to be a kind of folk belief that Burke was Anglo-Irish among a subset of those with only casual knowledge of him; this probably originated as a mistaken assumption based on he fact that his father was nominally a member of the Church of Ireland.  But I am aware of absolutely no historical evidence to support such a claim, and am aware of no appropriate contemporary scholarship that could be cited in support of it.   
Wiki4801 (talk) 17:35, 20 May 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: He may have spoken against the Ascendancy but he was a pretty typical member of the Anglo-Irish class. He and his father were members of the Established Church, he participated in the the professions and parliament, on occasions referred to himself as English (see Edmund Burke). Dabbler (talk) 15:36, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

text: I am using the definitions given in Anglo-Irish people#Anglo-Irish social class which says "The term "Anglo-Irish" is often applied to the members of the Church of Ireland who made up the professional and landed class in Ireland from the 17th century up to the time of Irish independence in the 20th century". Member of the Church of Ireland  - Check, professional class  - Check. Many of the more successful of them spent much of their careers either in Great Britain or in some part of the British Empire  - Check.  Dabbler (talk) 19:00, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

text: I can agree wholeheartedly with your second and third comments, it has been one of my thoughts about the article too. However, I am also concerned that this might degenerate into a List of Anglo-Irish people with lots of arguments about whether or not any individual was suitable to be included in the list. Dabbler (talk) 19:00, 31 May 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: If the definition in the section above is true, and it sounds true - "comfortable being in London as well as Dublin" (easily fitting in) - then Burke qualifies. It is or was a cultural thing.78.16.8.93 (talk) 19:42, 26 September 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Edmund Burke not Anglo-Irish! 

message: This article could use some extra eyeballs. Andy Dingley (talk) 17:31, 26 July 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Charles Algernon Parsons]] 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: I see that my edit was reverted, which I understand because I did neglect to explain the reason for my edit.  Edmund Burke should not be put in a list of prominent Anglo-Irish because he was not Anglo-Irish.  As the article clearly articulates, the Anglo-Irish were the descendants of British (primarily English) who formed a ruling class (the Protestant Ascendancy) in Ireland from the late seventeenth century to the Free State.  Edmund Burke was descended from the traditionally Catholic and heavily Gaelicised Burke family, whose name was of Norman extraction and had heavily intermarried with the native population until they were indistinguishable (see More Irish than the Irish themselves; the Burkes were actually the most Gaelicized of all of the Norman dynasties).  His mother was a Catholic and his father was a convert to Anglicanism from Catholicism, and so he fails to merit inclusion on this page.  Otherwise the term becomes muddied to the point where any Irish convert to Protestantism could be considered Anglo-Irish.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by ComradeKublai (talk • contribs) 06:14, 14 April 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Burke should not be included. 

message: In the article it is stated.
"However, Protestants in Ireland, and the Anglo-Irish class in particular, were by no means universally attached to the cause of continued political union with Great Britain. For instance, author Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), a clergyman in the Church of Ireland, vigorously denounced the plight of ordinary Irish Catholics under the rule of the landlords"
This seem a non sequitur; it does not follow that because Swift sometimes had concern and compassion for the catholic poor, that he was against the union.  Indeed from what I can tell Swift seems very much a  Williamite.  I think the reference to Swift in this section needs to be better supported or removed.
Any thoughts? Mr.JustPassing89.168.123.106 (talk) 11:27, 22 May 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: There was a cultural fork in the early 1700s, with one part of the Ascendancy satisfied with its long-term investments in Ireland, and another part who wanted the liberalism of John Locke to be expanded. Saying that the Anglo-Irish all believed the one thing is not the case. Swift wanted a clerical job in England, but was certainly not a hidebound religious bigot. In his time, Dublin was more of an English Protestant city; by 1800 it was more Catholic.78.19.195.209 (talk) 18:30, 31 July 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Swift a Nationalist? 

message: There appears to be a repetitive obsession on this talk page with the genealogy of the Anglo-Irish. There's also an overreliance on the wisdom of Ellen Wolf on this matter, a scholar who's written one book on the subject and isn't regarded as someone with any particular expertise in Irish history, let alone the period in question.
With respect to ancestry, the Anglo-Irish class evolved out of the confusion of the Tudor and Cromwellian conquests of Ireland, when the English Protestant settlers and their descendants mixed with the old Irish noble families as well as native Irish upstarts, who had converted to the established church either to retain their privileges or become upwardly mobile (we're talking about nobility as well as the nouveau riche). It isn't an ancestry group, or a group that has any particular genealogical origin. In the most general sense, Anglo-Irish families often had mixed Irish-English genealogies, regardless of what their surname might imply. To say, for example, that the Guinness family had "Gaelic origins" ignores the fact that the Anglo-Irish Guinnesses had mixed and married with English families, previously mixed and married with Old English families, and were neither "Gaelic" nor "Old English" in ethnicity. At the same time, it is similarly ahistorical to draw a distinction between "Gaelic" and "Hiberno-Norman" families in the 18th Century, who had been mixing for centuries prior. Trying to sort out the genealogies of the Anglo-Irish will invariably leave you with a tangled web of confusion, to say nothing of the limited value this has for readers.
Robert Fitzroy Foster, formerly the Carroll Professor of Irish History at Oxford, has made the point that,
"The Irish Ascendancy means the privileged Irish. We're talking about from the late 17th through the 18th Century, privileges as in every European ancien régime, privileges associated with religious profession. To be a member of the Ascendancy, to be privileged, [meant] you're Protestant."
He goes on to say,
"To be a member of the Ascendancy does not mean that you're only, let's say, the descendants of Cromwellian expropriators. It could mean that you're from a Catholic family who has cleverly converted at the right time."
(this commentary starts at 26:30 )
There's too much emphasis on genealogy in this article. Ancestrally, the group was hybridized. What's crucial in understanding the Anglo-Irish is the socioreligious and socioeconomic status they had in Irish society for the period in question. That means the subject should be approached as a cultural/ethnic group and social class, with perhaps maybe a quick (and nuanced) statement or two about ancestry.Jonathan f1 (talk) 01:29, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: And what is your point? The Banner talk 10:45, 27 October 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: The point was that there's some ridiculous statements in this article, like describing the Guinness family as "Gaelic" based on a surname. These editors are just looking at surnames and guessing the ancestry, and have no idea what most of these genealogies say. The so-called "Anglo Irish" were far more diverse in their origins than the article lets on, and the focus should stay on their social status rather than "origins" or ancestry. And the statement in the lead that most of them identified as "British" and not "Irish" is dubious and seems to be contradicted later on in the article. Jonathan f1 (talk) 22:18, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Genealogy 

message: The article seems to mostly refer to the Anglo-Irish in the past tense, but occasionally uses the present tense. The infobox provides numbers for the Anglo-Irish in both the Republic and Northern Ireland, which one might suppose to be intended as a claim that this is the number of living Anglo-Irish in those countries. (Incidentally, the citations currently given for the infobox numbers in both the Republic and NI do not appear to support the claimed numbers in any way; it isn't even clear what this information is supposed to mean.) As best I can tell from the article, the term has largely fallen out of use outside of historical contexts. However, looking at this talk page the meaning of the term may be disputed (or at least there may be some WP editors applying an anachronistic and/or misinformed definition). If the answer to my question is in fact disputed, it would be nice to mention the disputed status in the article. If the term is no longer applied to living people or has generally fallen out of use outside of historical contexts, the article could use cleanup and should probably make this fact clear. CAVincent (talk) 06:22, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: At its best, this article discusses a certain social class of Irish history that no longer has any special status in Ireland. At its worst, the article talks about "Anglo Irish" as something that might pop up on a DNA test -which is generally the source of most of the confusing and conflicting statements. Jonathan f1 (talk) 22:25, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: I guess you have sources to back up your claims? The Banner talk 23:05, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Setting aside sourcing for the moment, I'll repeat the question: Are there still Anglo-Irish in the 21st century? CAVincent (talk) 23:59, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: I have no reason to believe that the class has died out. The Banner talk 00:55, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Are there still Anglo-Irish in 21st century?