Normal People has Marianne falling in with a rich crowd at Trinity, the sort of kids who will end up running Ireland in the future, who call Connell, their intellectual equal, a "culchie," or a hick.
|
|
Other sources suggest that "culchie" is derived from the Irish word coillte, the Irish word for "woods" or "forests".
|
|
The term is also frequently used to refer to Dubliners that live in rural parts of county Dublin. The comedian Pat Shortt has made a successful living out of a culchie-themed act. He has his own television series, Killinaskully, based on a theme of a culchie in a village in rural Munster. Television presenter Dáithí Ó Sé has been said by humourist George Byrne of The Herald to have a style interpreted as anywhere from "edgy" to "a big lump of culchie cliché". Culch.
|
|
The 2008 winner was Adrian McCabe from Ballyjamesduff, County Cavan, where the next Culchie Festival was hosted, 23–25 October 2009.
|
|
The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that the word "culchie", a mildly derogatory term for a country person or one not from Dublin city, may be an "alteration of Kiltimagh, Irish Coillte Mach (older Mághach), the name of a country town in Co. Mayo".culchie, n. (and adj.) Oxford English Dictionary, second edition. Retrieved: 2012-03-22.
|
|
It became common practice in Dublin to use culchie in a derogatory manner. Over time, as the numbers of servants dwindled through the 20th century, the term was retained in everyday use. The word culchie may instead be derived from the Irish word ', 'woods, forests'. It was used by townspeople, mainly in the western counties of Mayo and Galway, as a condescending or pejorative reference to people from rural areas.
|
|
Culchie is a pejorative term in Hiberno-English and Ulster-Scots dialects for someone from rural Ireland. The term usually has a pejorative meaning directed by urban Irish against rural Irish, but since the late 20th century, the term has also been reclaimed by some who are proud of their rural or small town origin. In Dublin, the term culchie is often used to describe someone from outside the Dublin Region, including commuter towns such as Maynooth. In Belfast, Northern Ireland, the term is used to refer to persons from outside of the city proper but not necessarily outside the Greater Belfast area.
|
|
In the mid-1960s it was adopted as a common term in Dublin, as a counter to the country people's use of the word jackeen for a Dublin person. The culchie spelling is common in the English- language media, based on their understanding of phonetics and the word's derivation. It is also sometime spelled with a t before the ch, as cultchie, indicative of its more likely derivation from '. Culchie is also an Irish term for a simple, impromptu bed, chiefly consisting of planks, hastily slung between the tapered end of an inglenook fireplace and the nearest wall of a farmhouse kitchen.
|
|
The Culchie Festival started in 1989 in Clonbur, County Galway and ran until 2012. The festival took place in many towns and villages throughout Ireland in its search to find an exemplary culchie or "village character" – a local (perhaps even parochial) personality with the ability to entertain at will and excel at various stereotypically rural tasks. The festival was held in late October each year after regional heats held throughout Ireland and overseas Irish communities to select contestants. The final consists of various challenges, such as tractor racing, nappy changing, sandwich making, potato picking, knitting, and karaoke.
|
|
A similar concept exists in Irish politics in the form of the "Dublin 4 accent" and worldview (an area code in the affluent south of Dublin). The reference to this manner of speech highlights a difference between the metropolitan elite and the ordinary people (whether urban working-class or rural "culchie").
|
|
A culchie might be offered to anyone who asked for a bed for the night, who wasn't known to the family (rather like letting someone sleep in the barn). So, this could have become a derogatory term for traveling rural labourers and hence just country folk. However, originally it was just an example of common hospitality as often formerly offered to travellers and those in need.
|
|
The two of them are mostly seen drinking vinegar (Jack thinking it was whisky), and being visited by Soupy Norman, the title character. Soupy is always extremely aggressive and inebriated, and is only ever seen stumbling into the pair's house, delivering rambling, nonsensical rantings to the two men, always trying to punch Jack. In one episode, he asks to marry Esther's sister. He refers to Esther as "that culchie bitch".
|
|
The term is sometimes contrasted with Little Irelander, a derogatory term for an Irish person who is seen as excessively nationalistic, Anglophobic and xenophobic, sometimes also practising a strongly conservative form of Roman Catholicism. This term was popularised by Seán Ó Faoláin. "Little Englander" had been an equivalent term in British politics since about 1859. An antonym of jackeen, in its modern sense of an urban (and strongly British-influenced) Dubliner, is culchie, referring to a stereotypical Irish person of the countryside (and rarely pro-British).
|
|
The main story of the show concerns Esther, a Polish-Irish teenager from Buttevant, County Cork, who travels up to Dublin to study in college. There she encounters strong discrimination, for being a "culchie". She lives with Susan Costigan (or Gleeson, depending on the episode), described by Esther as "a woman with red hair", her daughter Kylie, her son Nathan (who becomes possessed by voices in the episode "Omen"), and her husband Declan. Kylie becomes Esther's friend, and they are seen stealing items (such as a dog) in the episode "Margarita".
|
|
It was, and still is to a certain extent, common practice in rural areas to enter a neighbour's house through the back door, to avoid tracking dirt through the house and to visit in the kitchen, rather than the front, which was used for more formal visits. Thus the term ' or culchie referred to such rural peoples used to such practices. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many city dwellers from Dublin tenements worked as domestic servants in the homes of wealthier people. The servants were not permitted to enter the house through the front door but had to use the back door or servants' entrance.
|
|
John Boland in the Irish Independent has said how the characters lack depth: "I've never been much of a fan of Pat Shortt's broad brand of comedy, with its gallery of cartoon-culchie villager wearing silly wigs and speaking in exaggerated mock accents." Boland continued, "Killinaskully makes Shortt's earlier work with Jon Kenny in D'Unbelievables seem like Curb Your Enthusiasm by comparison". Adele King dislikes the "paddywhackery", describing it as "insular, embarrassing and lacking in sophistication". Despite repeated negative publicity from critics the show pulls in an average viewership of 500,000 for each episode, which rose as high as 800,000 for the Christmas specials on 25 December.
|
|
Leaving secondary school in 1933 he joined the well-known Dublin bakers, Peter Kennedy & Sons as a trainee ledger clerk. He had been interested in acting and drama from an early age and he joined the A.O.H. Players in 1934 and played with many of the leading amateur drama groups in the city in the following years. In 1936 while performing in the pantomime ‘Jack & the Beanstalk’ with the Fr. Matthew Players he created what was to become one of his favourite characters – John Joe Mahockey from Ballyslapdashamuckery – an astute countryman or Culchie to use the Dublin expression, who wore a flat cap with an enormous peak, navy blue suit, white shirt, red tie and a large pair of brown hobnailed boots. Jack was a first cousin of the Irish portrait painter Leo Whelan.
|
|