The Irish in Britain, including those of Irish descent, make up a significant part of the UK population. Here, you will find news, entertainment, events, sports and features from the local Irish Post newspaper.

SOMETHING my mother said recently really stuck in my mind. After returning to Ireland some 10 years ago after many, many years in England she casually remarked the other day that one thing she noticed was how the old accents were disappearing.

People were speaking differently. Now second-generation people are probably more acutely aware of accent than most Irish people in that one of the enduring aspects of our identity is that we are Irish but sound English.

Most of us come to terms with that and it becomes something we happily accept — identifying as much with our home towns as we do with Ireland anyway — but it always remains a factor.

Even for those of us who may not in fact connect with the geographical entity of Ireland so much anyway, whose Irishness is the Irishness of our lives in our English cities, having an English accent is always there.

It may not quite be the elephant in the room but it still needs explaining.

So I found it startling that my mother after so many years away, after listening for so much time to all of those English accents in her own house, among her own children and grandchildren, would still notice the watering down of accents here in Ireland. But she’s dead right.

Once you stop and listen you can hear the subtle changes and you can see how prevalent it is.

To be blunt, Irish people are beginning to sound less and less Irish.

Now obviously there is still a lot of richness here in people’s accents.

People of a certain generation still have accents that are strong and localised even to the extent that they may well be extremely hard to fathom for the untutored ear.

Such in fact is the richness of accent here that even I, after only nine years, can tell some differences in accent even within those living within a fairly small radius.

So is it possible to tell that someone is maybe from 20 miles further west when you hear them speak?

You can tell the city accents in the summer when they come down for a break. You can tell if someone is a townsman or a country man sometimes.

Within this generation the accent a person has relates directly to their surroundings. It is organic if you like.

This is quite clearly changing though and it is hard to tell how this is coming about.

It seems there may be two major factors at play when you stop to think about it.

One is in many ways connected with the economic boom that Ireland has undergone.

This economic explosion has made Ireland a more openly unequal society than ever before and has made the lie of the classless society impossible to sustain.

Thus Steve Staunton’s failings as a soccer manager are exploited by mocking his regional accent, a rogue conman on an advertisement will have a heavy inner-city Dublin accent, Jackie Healy-Rae will caricature himself by exaggerating his Kerry accent.

This all lends itself to the new snobbery of the new Irish who in shaking off the past are also keen to shake off the sound of it.

Not for them the accents and phrase of their parents or their locality. In the age of aspiration they aspire to sound more like those RTÉ voices — the Gay Byrnes and Ryan Turbridys, the Pat Kennys, the sound of successful, well-educated privileged Ireland.

Indeed if RTÉ is going to have a strongly-accented voice like, for instance, Joe Duffy, it is going to give him a show where he has to talk to ordinary people all the time.

And it is the slight, watered-down Irish accent that seems to be the most sought-after, the one that is in effect most aping an English one.

The other factor is that of the all-pervasive mass media. Whilst Irish society has become far more liberal and far more open in the last 20 years this has also brought with it more outside influences and as the outlets for this become more and more numerous this is affecting the way a whole new generation of Irish people speak.

So the voice of an Irish youth of a certain age often sounds as much like a voice from the television or the internet as it does the hills and lanes and streets that surround it.

It is no longer an accent that shows changes within 20 miles away as it is in essence an accent that has grown up far away from Ireland itself.

Or more precisely in a virtual Ireland.