Als Kind bin ich zum Beispiel immer davon ausgegangen, dass wir Mayo erfunden haben, denn nun ja… Mayo. Ich weiß, dass das Bild nicht in Mayo ist, aber ich liebe Water Castle einfach und es kommt dem nahe.
Dies ist weniger spezifisch für Irland, aber ich dachte auch, dass Aluminium ein Metall sei, das wir zur Feier des Jahrtausends erfunden haben. Die Millennium-Gedenkmünze war für mich natürlich aus Aluminium gefertigt. Es gab sie vorher noch nie, da Alufolie aus Zinn hergestellt wurde.
https://i.redd.it/jnutnmi1lgkg1.jpeg
Von AJurassicSuccess
36 Kommentare
Lough Neagh is a divot left behind from Setenta paying hurling. The missing but is now the Isle of Man.
I remember as a child hearing news of bombings in the North and being too young to understand what was going on, so I asked my Mam.
I think she simply said, England things it should be part of them, which I took utterly at face value and literally. I had a concept of Pangea but not how borders are defined and assumed that people in England thought Northern Ireland was once fused to Britain and simply floated away and landed on Ireland. I would be looking at maps and trying to figure out where it started and assumed it had fallen off north of Wales.
I always thought the stretch of land across Belfast Lough from where I live was England. I was sorely disappointed when I discovered it was just Bangor 💀
When I was very young I assumed the song „Mrs. Robinson“ had something to do with our president at the time, Mary Robinson.
I lived in England until I was 8, we came over here for every school holiday. We lived in a city over there. Anyway, I told everyone the Irish for Stop was Yield
Being told Round Towers were defensive structures
There were quite a few Norman surnames around when I was growing up, both locally and in sport (Darcy, Fitzgerald, Burke, Butler, Prendergast, Barry etc.) which I assumed were Irish since they were so common.
So I was fascinated by seeing so many similar names in France. Did a load of Irish head over to France at some stage and have loads of kids?
I misunderstood „county“ as „count tae“ because of being raised with the Donegal accent
So when on road trips as a kid I thought when my ma would say „we’re in county Sligo“ for example I thought we were on the way to Sligo and you could count the time it took to get there
I just assumed there were these distances in-between towns called „count tos“
I was a very special boy
Age 6 in the late 70s, I couldn’t understand why unemployed people didn’t just become priests, because priests got free houses, food, clothes etc.
I thought islands floated
My first prolonged stay in Ireland was when I was 5 or 6 in house my parents had rented for a couple of months while scouting the area for property to buy. During this time I became aquanted with spongebob on TG4. It was years before I realised spongebob wasn’t an Irish cartoon. Between Painty the Pirate being on theme with my arrival via boat as well as the Irish language I guess it just fit. You can also imagine my confusion going around Europe and finding out that all the other countries used Irish money too.
My London cousin thought Taisteal go mall was the name of several villages back west.
I loved when my grandparents would tell me the story of the lough in cork. Completely believed it when I was younger and it made visiting there by where they lived excited. Ill give a TLDR, my nan and grandad would embellish it.
There was a castle where the lough is and it had a magic well that had to be covered every night. One night they had a party and it was left to the princess to cover the well at the end of the night. Well the princess fell asleep and the well overflowed. Turning all the party’s attendees into swans and ducks and submerging the whole castle until only the tip top of the castle remained. That tip top of the castle is hidden by the „island“ of brush in the center of the lough.
Made sense to me because thats where all the swans and ducks nested.
yes, the time my mum broke the wooden spoon off my arse and I smugly laughed.. then she laughed and pulled out a spare
I misunderstood the preparedness of an Irish mammy
I used to think that there was an actual market in Dublin called „The Black Market“ where you could buy stolen/smuggled things as well as drugs.
I always thought my mums name in Irish was “Mise”
Being told by my teacher in 3rd class that this island was the actual Diarmuid and Grainnes bed
https://www.google.com/maps/@52.6813481,-8.6095873,3a,47.9y,329.03h,88.22t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sZAJzVfl9ll0qpiD6MJpp0Q!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D1.7783035303475572%26panoid%3DZAJzVfl9ll0qpiD6MJpp0Q%26yaw%3D329.03127466277715!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDIxNi4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
I recall thinking Caillou was Irish because I thought the name looked Irish.
We’d drive by the psychiatric hospital-owned homes for the elderly. I always thought it was cool to see old people living together like friends. Ask my mam what was going on there. „It’s for people with sick heads“. I wasn’t prepared for vividly imagining the horrific bedrooms where old men and women would be lying in bed, while their literal heads were vomiting onto the pillows.
The banshee. That’s her wailing. Jaysus we were terrified. Turns out it’s wildlife mating. I fecking thought there was a dead woman wailing and if you went outside you’d be dead.
Still have a fear of the dark to this day.
I was in Bucharest years ago and witnesses an Irish couple in the airport being absolutely perplexed that not only were there Ryanair flights from there, but that they weren’t flying to or from Dublin. They were utterly shocked to discover from me that less than 10% of Ryanair flights originate from Ireland.
Honestly when I first heard of the Mayo Clinic online I just assumed it was some Connaght based hospital that were really ahead of the game and had a super informative website.
I also thought Stira – the attic stairs company that appeared on the Late Late invented those stairs in the mid 2000s. In my house we just had a piece of plywood and a shitty ladder we’d precariously use to get up and down there. Figured everyone did that until some Irish lads came up with a foldable ladder on springs that live in the attic. This assumption was crushed when I watched National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989) and Chevy Chase gets stuck up in the attic when his mother in law closed the Stira on him.
My parents lived in Saudi for a few years before I was born, they would talk about their Irish pals over there and refer to them as ex-pats, growing up I always assumed that it was a term only for Irish people, like “ex-paddy”
When I was a lad I believed my visit at the weekend to an old fort in Donegal was the remnants of Tír na nÓg and it just looked like a ruin because the fairies were hiding from us
My Mam grew up in Dingle – thinking Carhoo West across the bay was Russia 🥹
When I first moved to Ireland I honestly thought people working in the shops would converse with me in Irish.
I was 38.
There’s a model at the visitor centre at Glenveagh National Park of the local mountains. You can press buttons on an information board beside it and it lights up an LED on the corresponding mountain.
Muckish mountain has a very prominent cairn on top of it, which I assumed was a massive light, the same as on the model.
My family still remind me of this every time we see the mountain, over 30 years later.
I assumed Jesus and the Simpsons were both Irish. I didn’t think they were connected, but I did find out that neither of them were Irish during the same car ride home from school one day.
I thought the Mayo Clinic was a world famous medical centre in county Mayo
My mate and I kayaked out to mcdermot(above) castle and camped in it, we were talking to a scotsman on holiday and told him we heard that yer man who owned the castle had a ‚wild‘ daughter and had her locked up to keep her out of trouble before he could marry her off (may not be true cant remember where we got that from) but next noon when we were coming back he yelled at us “did ye find that horny ghost!?“. Lough Key attracts the best people.
That the whole Spanish armada descendants thing was real
I thought mohair wool was made from wool from sheep who lived on the cliffs of Mother.
I thought Opel was an Irish car brand cos they sponsored the Irish football team.
I thought Mayo was a black out spot for internet, electricity, basic modernisation as I thought it was „too out of the way“. I had images as a 10 year old (I’m 28) that the people of Mayo lived by kerosene lamps and didn’t know what a SuperValu was. Not sure when I realised Mayo was not a remnant of 1800s Ireland or why I thought they were so developmentally behind!
When I was a small child, the famines in Somalia and Ethiopia were all over the news. The only languages I knew about were Irish and English, and Irish people speak English which was confusing. So, since Trocaire were in Africa, and Irish people don’t speak Irish, I thought that African people speak Irish, and we learn Irish in school so that we can go over there to speak to them and help them.
Not particularly Irish,but I always thought the tooth fairy was a man. No idea why but it was only when my oldest lost his first tooth that I was told otherwise
I thought diaspora was an Irish word because I only ever heard it in relation to Irish people. That went on for far too long