Why are Irish accents always so bad on screen?

Analysis: the list of bad Irish accents on screen is so long that you'd think it's the hardest accent of all to master

Begorrah, bejaysus we've heard some atrocious Irish accents over the years, to be sure. The list of bad Oirish accents on screen is so long (say, as long as the distance between Dublin and Dingle for those that have watched Leap Year) that you’d be forgiven for thinking that it’s the hardest accent to master.

Recent offenders that come to mind are Wild Mountain Thyme (2020) and Rings of Power (2022), the Lord of the Rings prequel TV series in which the harfoots, ancestors to the hobbits, are portrayed in a way that had Ed Power labelling it as "famine cosplay" in the Irish Times. The Australian dialect coach for the show told Inverse the harfoots appear with "an Irish base to their accent," but they do not speak as though they’ve walked out of a "particular cross street in Dublin."

Wild Mountain Thyme director John Patrick Stanley defended the accents in his film saying that if the characters sounded exactly like his relatives spoke, no one would understand them. "You have to make the accent more accessible to a global audience," he said. ‘I’m not making this movie for the Irish. If you try to get the Irish to love you, no good will come of it. I’m making this movie for everybody else and all the people who want to go to Ireland,’ he told Variety.

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Perhaps, therein lies the problem? When it comes to bad Irish accents on screen, "it all kind of boils down to who the media is created for," says Dr Stephen Lucek, Assistant Professor in linguistics at UCD. Irish-based TV and film does portray authentic voices, "ordinary Irish people doing their ordinary Irish voices", including TV shows like Derry Girls, Bad Sisters and Normal People.

"When you look at other sorts of media — back to Darby O'Gill and the Little People — there is a disregard for authenticity. There's no feeling that we should be doing this in a way that pays respect to the people behind the characters. What ends up happening, is we have an idea of what the rest of the world expects an Irish person to sound like and it's the cartoon on the box of Lucky Charms, and then there's what Irish people actually sound like. It's all almost always very, very different."

There's a long history of disrespect when it comes to the portrayal of Irish people, says Lucek. "Starting with the stage Irishman of London-based theatre in the 1660s onward. Where this buffoonish, often drunk, often ignorant, individual stumbles onto the screen and says terrible awful, demeaning things, and is ridiculed."

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From RTÉ 2FM's Dave Fanning, dialect coach Poll Moussoulides talks about working with Catherine O Hara and Daisy Edgar-Jones on their Irish accents

"To come around to the linguistics of it, there's a set of sounds that are going to be a little bit different in any variety of English, it's usually vowel sounds. In Irish English we have a lot of consonant sounds that are a little bit different than other varieties. Any dialect coach worth their salt will know what those sounds are and they'll probably have a spreadsheet of where this sound should be and what are the catchwords." Some of the best dialect coaches, are those who study linguistics themselves, says Lucek.

Before we go giving out about our particularly bad lot, it’s not that there’s anything more difficult about an Irish accent as such, it’s that people aren’t as exposed to Irish accents as they are to, for example, American ones, explains Lucek. "There is a smaller volume of data to work with. It's easier to do in American accent because you've probably heard a lot more American voices than the typical American person has heard Irish voices. Whereas most Americans, the only Irish people they've ever heard speak out loud are, like, Bono and Conor McGregor."

When it comes to actually forming an accent, there are a lot of components to wrap your head, or mouth, around. "Really all the levels of linguistics are variable based on where they're used in the world," says Lucek. "An accent can take a lot of different forms. Mainly it's going to be concerned with where in the mouth a specific sound is made."

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From RTÉ Brainstorm, what do our accents say about us?

The international phonetic alphabet describes how speech sounds. "It helps to know those sounds, to be able to then describe variations from them in different dialects or accents, like Irish accents. You'll have a set of where this specific vowel sound should be, in this particular variety of English, be it Dublin English."

"That's just the set of sounds. There’s also prosody, which is how the sounds fit together and where the emphasis comes, how long the vowel sounds last, which can be a little bit different. Oftentimes [prosody] has a tie-in to social meaning." Syntax can also have a role in showing authenticity. "Like, 'I'm after having me dinner' is a lot different to ‘I already ate’. Vocabulary comes into as well," he explains.

It’s important that accents are portrayed authentically on screen if you want to show respect for the material and for the people who are the basis for the material, says Lucek. "When you're making a TV show or a movie, you're very particular about light and sound. You have foley artists who do all the the additional sound recording and you're really careful that things are heard properly, they look right, but then it just seems it's so low on the priority list to make it sound like an authentic voice. I think sometimes it's not considered — ‘if it's good enough, it's good enough’."