The Philosophy of Immersion Posting - Part 1
Introduction
Recently I came across a TikTok by a creator called Garron Noone, someone who I could immediately tell was a Millennial without having to check his age. The Tiktok is a skit called “Here’s a list of things that Irish people cannot do”. The list includes “being a goth”, “being a CEO”, “appreciating modern art”, “having a pet snake” and so on. The essence of the joke is that it is not possible for an Irish person to do these “out there” things as they are just too much of a culchie farmer to pull it off. As Garron says, “The minute I open my mouth, you’d just know I’ve pulled a lamb out of a sheep’s arse, and that’s not very goth.”
Immersion posting feels like an old joke at this stage, so I am quite surprised that I continue to see it year after year. What’s striking is how it really feels specifically tied to the Millennial generation, and perhaps younger members of Gen-X, but doesn’t seem to be as much of a thing with Irish Gen-Z. It feels like Immersion posting will be something particular to those generations, and it’s worth taking a look at why that is.
What is “Immersion Posting”?
The immersion posting shtick is that Irish people, no matter where they are, or what situation they are in, are always the same old, funny, provincial, & ordinary people, devoid of grandiose “notions” or pretensions. There’s usually an implied lack of grandiosity — whereas other countries may have ostentatious ideas or behaviour, the Irish are just your regular old culchies, same as they were when they were back in the village they grew up in. Immersion posting consists of chicken fillet rolls, interjecting “ah shur Jaysus, and immersion induced paranoia amongst menopausal midlands mammies.
Immersion posting gets its name from the “Irish Mammy” meme, which is effectively the personification of the joke. An Irish Times article describes the meme as:
“a bewildering blend of wackiness, threats, affection, quick quips and, well, notions about herself. And amid her ongoing preoccupations with the weather, or tea, or the immersion heater, or the next-door neighbours, she’ll always find time to do her son’s weekly wash. She can’t text to save her life, but she’s well able to put manners on her kids (and their mates). She never let you have the good biscuits, in case there were visitors.”
The Irish Mammy is a loving mother and housewife, carrying many provincial traits and quirks once universal among Irish people in the southern state; she endearingly tries her best to navigate her world through a period of immense economic, social & technological change. She’s always on about her successful children making big money in faraway places like Dubai and Australia.
The misuse of the definite article ‘The’ is a core comedic device employed. She needs help working “The Skype”. And she is always afraid she’s accidentally left the Immersion on while she’s out of the house [INSERT LAUGH TRACK HERE].
She’s obsessed with keeping up appearances in that old-fashioned way. And of course she finds all this new-fangled technology completely bewildering, being a simple peasant, unlike her children, one of whom got 600 points in his Leaving Cert and now works for NASA. At it’s heart, the Irish Mammy character is homely, sincere, and innocent to the point of warranting condescension.
While the Irish Mammy is an endearing and overall positive characterization, the divide is not nearly so harmonious in practice, with many millennials tweeting and tiktoking their frustrations of living with their parents as a result of the housing crisis, as it means they have to listen to them say something supposedly very racist, and having to “educate” them that they can’t say something anymore. These posts have almost certainly risen with the rise of immigration as an issue, though there likely isn’t any data to verify.
The Irish Mammy meme hits at something deep in the relationship between the average Irish Millennial and their parents & grandparents, and ultimately is a story of the Celtic Tiger, and the profound change Ireland has gone through in the last 40 years. As millennials were born between 1980-1995, they grew up throughout the Celtic Tiger, a time when as Peter Zeihan describes it “everyone was becoming a yuppie” and along with meteoric economic growth, massive portions of the population moved from the countryside to the city, all in a much shorter amount of time than took place in the development of other western countries.
Accelerated Modernity
The fact that Ireland went through this change in the space of 1-2 generations creates a very distinctive generational divide. While all western countries have had some dichotomy of conservative parents vs. liberal children, Ireland’s seems quite unique. In other western countries, the cultural change that occurs as a population becomes more urbanised and technologically advanced would happen slow enough to not be as shocking from one generation to the next.
Using World Bank data, in 1960, Ireland’s urban population was 45% of the total population (from a total population of roughly 2.8 million). By 2016, this figure had risen to 64%. Compare this to Great Britain, which went from 74% in 1960 to 83% in 2016. Ireland’s urban population increases by 19%, while Britain’s at only 9%. During the last 60 years, Britain has always had two thirds of it’s population being urban, yet Ireland only reaches a urban population above 50% in 1969. Using available historical data for Britain, to find the year Britain’s urban population was only 45% of the total, we would need to go back to 1831, two years after Catholic Emancipation & 1 year before the famous Reform Act.
Urbanisation alone is not a cause of social liberalisation, but it is associated with it, as most election maps in Western countries will show. In any American Election, a State that voted mainly red (for the Republican party) will always have little blue dots (voting Democrat), which are usually the major cities of the state.
Along with rapid Urbanisation, The Celtic Tiger period would have seen a large rise in the human capital of the country - more skilled workers, more high-income earners, more of the population having been to higher education, or working for multinationals. It is hard to overstate the change in Ireland in the last half a century, it should not be forgotten that in 1963, ¾ homes in rural Ireland did not have indoor plumbing, and electrification of rural areas was a major government agenda. By 1965, only 80% of rural households had electricity. In 1970, an RTE report on the modern farming home featured the following a quote, showcasing what economic modernisation for rural Ireland meant at this time - “we would like to see all houses with water into the house, especially in the kitchen, we would like to see the kitchen sink near where she cooks because this is number one in the woman’s work”.
Urbanisation coupled with technological change & rapidly rising living standards would almost guarantee a radical shift in social values in any Western country. Add in the explosion of American media in the late-20th Century abroad, which Ireland consumed whole-heartedly, and you have a recipe for the most profound change in social values we have seen in centuries. With America still ascendant, this was often the model for the good life, and shaped the culture, dreams & ambitions of this new generation of Irish people growing up in the 80’s, 90’s & early 00’s. These new values & dreams can be summed up in this symbolic Hardy Bucks clip, where Eddie Durkan says to his uncle, a farmer: “Skyscrapers & big money, that’s what I want now Mick. I want the real deal, sports cars and beaches and bikini’d women and all that craic y’know?”.
Generational Divide
This coupled with Irish millennials benefiting from the expansion of higher education in the late 90s would result in a great disparity in terms of standards, norms and even competency between this generation & their parents - hence the view of the irish mammy as something of a doddering buffoon, unable to cope with modern technology and a rapidly changing world. It is interesting to see the Irish Times’ article above is from 2017, showing the meme was just hitting peak mainstream right as “Progressive Ireland” was ascendant, right between the two generation defining referendums on Gay Marriage & Abortion, when the cultural transformation of Ireland would have been complete, and thus the generational divide impossible not to notice.
The parent’s of Irish Millennials would have grown up in during the 70’s and 80’s, in an Ireland still in the image of De Valera’s “dreary paradise” - economically impoverished, with large waves of youth emigration, and still a very rural & deeply religious country. While change was beginning, life in the average town or village for many people in this era still centred around a few main pillars - the church, the pub, the GAA and perhaps the small farm also. The rapid transformation can be seen in the centrality of these institutions to Irish Life in decades past, and how this has changed in recent decades.
The Ireland of Irish Millennials’ parents was a country that prided itself in exceptional levels of religiosity unrivalled anywhere in the Western world. This can be seen in events such as the 8th Amendment Referendum in 1983, to implement a constitutional ban on abortion, with the Yes side being a section of grassroots groups campaigning against a liberalising section of the political & media class. Or take this interview from 1990 asking young Irish men what their thoughts on Feminism is. Or the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1979, which had an attendance of 2.5 million people in a country of 3.3 million.
It is interesting to note that the Pope’s visit resulted in many Irish babies being named John or Paul, many of whom would surely grow up to be quite scornful of Catholicism, coming of age just as the Church scandals were hitting the news, and Father Ted had hit the airwaves. Church attendance has collapsed over the last 30 years, with many parishes now consolidating with neighbouring ones to accomodate for much smaller numbers of parishioners.
The traditional pub still holds an iconic place in the image of Ireland, but increasing numbers of young people do not drink (including this author), as alternative lifestyles & options for an evening out have become available. Going to “the local” pub used to be the default activity for most men in a town or village but traditional Pubs are continuing to close in significant numbers, particularly in rural areas, a process that can be seen in motion at least as far back as the strengthening of drink driving laws, and has been further accelerated by the increased taxation on alcohol resulting in more people choosing to stay at home.
People laughed at the Healy-Rae’s proposing a “drink-driving permit”, but the reaction obscured the fact that many rural pubs were forced to close as a result of drink-driving law changes, with the end result is many people just stayed at home instead, which was a big loss for the most remote areas of rural Ireland. This process accelerated greatly with the Covid lockdowns, which saw several closures of pubs which had been in continuous business since the 1800s.
The GAA survives the best of these traditional institutions, but will come under increasing pressure to stop having the demographics of a Gaelic ethnostate. On the surface, the GAA is arguably thriving, but at the same time, with the increasing individualisation of society, greater proportions of young Irish people are able to live their lives completely detached from it, enmeshed in their own separate interests and subcultures. Gone are the days when banning those who play or watch “foreign sports” would be a remotely feasible idea. Nevertheless it remains strong, and the attempts at the modernising mainstream to reform the GAA have so far been fairly benign, such as attempts to make helmets mandatory in hurling.
The Church, the Pub & the GAA are all institutions that revolve first & foremost around one’s local community. For most people in these, their local parish was their whole world, and while they may have some interest in the outside world, such as new songs, bands or trends, most of their identity remained entirely rooted in the local & the collective. As many areas of rural Ireland continue to decline, and become entirely devoid of young people who have either moved to Dublin or emigrated, the old buildings of these institutions remain as almost relics of a bygone age.
Whether this change is mostly good or bad depends on your politics. This author sees Westernisation as having been mostly good, and I feel much more at home in a country that is more rich, urban, secular & individualistic, rather than one that was poor, rural, clannish & exceptionally religious, as was the case half a century ago. This is clearly the position of most Irish Millennials, who have a view of 60s Ireland that is probably more sinister and unbearable than it was in reality.
In particular, they seem unable to name anything about this Ireland that was possibly better in that era than the present (other than housing), such as more stable families, stronger local communities, a more vibrant rural Ireland, a positive birth rate, drug use being non-existent, much cleaner city streets, better mental health with far fewer deaths by suicide, less reports of people stating loneliness is a major problem in their life, or one of the lowest crime rates ever seen. Unfortunately it seems like a rule of human society that we cannot correct, we can only over-correct, and it becomes a case of which extreme’s problems are you more willing to bear. The ideal situation would be getting the trade-offs as good as possible between these two extremes.