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An old but good article from independent.ie:

Beyond the pale By Pat Fitzpatrick, Sunday August 24 2008

With the culchie’s undignifed demotion to second-class citizen, Pat Fitzpatrick argues for a statue of The Unknown Culchie; a young fella in a Clare jersey, gearbag in one hand, Spar bag in the other, complete with ‘Evening Press’, chocolate HobNobs and 20 Carrolls

My culchie-in-Dublin past came back to me recently as I drove through Ranelagh with my girlfriend. As we passed by noodle bars, juice bars and a Michelin-starred restaurant, I went into old-man mode, recalling when this was all TV rental shops, scruffy grocers and all-day breakfasts.

Nostalgia aside, though, gentrification suits the place. Only somebody addicted to misery would want to turn back time on Ranelagh Road. But the brash new premises tell the same story as their counterparts in Rathmines and Drumcondra; culchie Dublin is dead and gone. And without it, Dublin and the rest of the country have drifted apart like ex-lovers, sniping and sneering at each other from different worlds.

These culchie ghettos were a part of rural Ireland in the capital. On the northside, they clung to the Tolka and the Royal Canal in Drumcondra and Phibsborough. Across the Liffey, culchies colonised either side of the Grand Canal from Harold’s Cross to Leeson Street. CIE largely decided where you stayed. If your train arrived into Connolly, you went northside, while Heuston arrivals stayed south. This created a provincial divide with Ulster and Connaught mainly up north, and Munster people sticking to the Grand Canal. It didn’t matter where you were from of course; Dublin has one word for everybody from Tory Island to Cork city, and that word is “culchie”.

Back before Dublin had African shops and Chinese people in Statoil, we were the only foreign group in the city. That said, as somebody who came up from Cork after college in 1989, it didn’t feel at all foreign to me. If anything, being a culchie in Dublin felt like being Irish in New York, with a ready-made network to ease your way into the place.

In a crumbling red-brick in Rathmines or Drumcondra, a thickset Midlands landlord with body odour and a big set of keys would give you a flat with fleas. You didn’t have a car, so these ghettos were handy for walking to work and staggering back from the pub. In drinking dens such as Slatterys of Rathmines or the Big Tree in Drumcondra, you could meet other culchies who would be handy for picking up a job or maybe even a nurse for some casual sex back in the fleapit.

There was the legendary greasy spoon somewhere around Richmond Street, a greasy spoon for pissed culchies that stayed one step ahead of the health-and-safety crowd by opening in the dead of night. All of us were in there at least once, but most of us couldn’t point out the place in the sober light of day, giving it a kind of mythical aura. Nobody who went there sober ever returned.

You got a sense of continuity from the older culchies in places such as Morriseys on Leeson Street or Birchalls in Ranelagh, pubs with black-and-white pictures of old GAA stars to remind the drinkers when they were king of the walk. On the site of what is now the trendy TriBeCa in Ranelagh, there was the Pronto Grill. It seemed empty all week except for Sundays, when single country people in their 50s and 60s would sit alone at tables set for four and make a roast last for a couple of hours. This would drive us to even greater feats of socialising to make sure we wouldn’t end up alone.

When the days got longer, culchie Dublin would swell to bursting point with GAA jerseys and funny accents up for the match. If you shared a house, it was not unusual to get up on a Sunday and find a stranger in an Offaly jersey sleeping on the living-room floor. He would introduce himself as Scobie, tell you he felt rough enough now so he did, and you would go off together to get an all-day breakfast.

This seems parochial and quaint now, but at the time it was exciting and new. I met my first Monaghan person. When you come from an insular county like Cork, the sound of a Monaghan accent is as odd as having breakfast with a walrus. I learned that a man can have any woman he wants as long as he has a Donegal accent; that Mayo people are always up to something; and Kerry people have a sly charm.

Dublin was a culchie city. The Dubs who didn’t keep to themselves in the suburbs blended in with the country people in the city centre. The fact was that most of them qualified as culchies anyway under the parentage rule; all but one of the Dubs I knew when I lived there had at least one parent from the country.

This was Dublin then at the time of the lost civilisation of the culchies, a familiar place that glued the provinces together, and made the capital more like a large Irish town than a small European city.

And then it became Zurich. At least that’s how my aunt from Cork described it when she bought me lunch off Grafton Street one afternoon in the late-Nineties, and when I lifted my head out of the trough long enough, I could see she was right. Dublin was becoming just another European city, complete with glass, steel and rude waitresses.

Culchie Dublin was steamrolled in a few short years. With so many jobs out around the M50, and the daft rental prices in town, the new culchie bought a car and scattered to places like Sandyford and Blanchardstown. The old culchie ghettos they left behind were either gentrified or taken on by immigrants, replacing fry-ups and dingy pubs with smoothies and halal butchers.

To mark its passing, we should commission a commemorative bronze statue at Ranelagh Triangle and call it The Unknown Culchie; a young fella in a Clare jersey with a gearbag in one hand and a Spar bag in the other, containing an Evening Press, chocolate HobNobs, crispy pancakes and 20 Carrolls.

It’s not that anybody misses it. I caught up with two of my Ranelagh housemates from the mid-Nineties recently for a nostalgia fest, and we all agreed that Dublin is a better place having moved from Carrickmacross to Zurich. But as Dublin turned its face to the outside world, the culchies became just another immigrant group in the city.

Culchies can still thrive in the capital. Ray D’Arcy is the biggest star on radio due to his ability to marry culchie charm with modern Ireland. Matt Cooper and George Hook show that people like a Cork accent on the way home from work. Brian Cowen is the Taoiseach, replacing Bertie’s north Dublin cabal with a bunch of culchies, most notably Mary Coughlan. Declan Kidney manages the rugby team. The TV can’t get enough of the Seoige sisters, Kathryn Thomas, Richard Corrigan, Podge and Rodge, and many more.

Outside of well-known Ireland, anybody who has tried to get a seat on a train out of Dublin on a Friday can tell you that there are still a huge number of culchies enjoying life in the capital. But when I was on the Cork train recently, it was obvious from their clothes and accents that this new breed of culchie is far more urbane and worldly than we were. None of them looked like they might thump the table at any moment and scream, “How’s she cuttin’?” at a bunch of ruddy-faced lads coming down the train.

These trains go to another world. Dublin people not familiar with the country might think that it is full of adventure centres, farmers’ markets and holistic healing centres. It isn’t. People still go to Mass. They read headlines like “Miniature Airplanes Fly High Over Ballycarney” in local newspapers and listen out for deaths on local radio. They attend a lifetime of funerals. By and large, they vote pro-life and anti-change. They might not have any gays in the village. And they don’t like Dublin.

The growing distance between Dublin and culchie Ireland is causing a lot of grief. Look at the row that erupted when Shannon lost its link to Heathrow. Much of the Dublin-based media scoffed at the campaign to save the link, with a couple of writers suggesting that if the people of the West of Ireland want a proper airport and economic infrastructure, then move to Dublin.

But the ferocity of the campaign on the west coast came as no surprise to those of us who live outside Dublin. Culchies are nervous. Our livelihoods rely on a fragile mix of agriculture, fishing, tourism and a small band of multinationals. Unlike in Dublin, where people just start looking for a new job when a place closes down, a lot of people who lose their jobs in the country have to up sticks and move. When I worked in computers in Cork, in a job that wasn’t particularly specialised, I probably would have had to move from the city if the company disappeared. It’s spread that thinly.

Motorists in Cork and Galway sit in traffic jams and listen to news of Luas and Metro lines for Dublin. Rural hospitals close down. The fishermen can’t fish. There are whole swathes of the country without broadband. Dublin 4 holds its nose at the sight of Brian Cowen’s victory tour around Offaly, unaware that a lot of public events in the country still involve singing on the back of a lorry and a choir of yahoos. I heard an AA roadwatch woman on Today FM recently say that traffic was heavy on the northside of Cork city and motorists were advised to avoid the area if at all possible. This must have come as a disappointment to the 50,000 people who live there.

And still people in Dublin were surprised when rural Ireland decided to strike from the long grass on the Lisbon referendum. The yes/no constituency map of Ireland that filled our screens after the referendum is the most graphic sign yet that the culchies are pissed off.

There’s more to all this than a feeling in the shires that rural Ireland is missing out on its share of the national pie. There is also a feeling in culchie Ireland that the capital has moved on and left it behind.

Dublin is like one of those plain girls in a high-school movie who takes her glasses off, lets her hair down and starts hanging around with the cool gang of New York, Barcelona and Berlin. Suddenly, she starts ignoring her old plain friends in Castlebar and Cork, who are a bit of an embarrassment with their funny accents and last year’s clothes. They are like the bridge-and-tunnel crowd you hear the woman cringing about on Sex and the City, suburban oafs who come into Manhattan at the weekend and lower the tone of the place.

Just like New York, Dublin has become a restless place with its eyes on the future, replacing anything shabby that reminds it of the bad old days with the kind of buildings, restaurants and motorways that a world-class city deserves. That’s what makes it so exciting. As with New York, it is now an inclusive and tolerant place that has become pretty blind to colour, religion and sexual preference. That makes it hugely attractive.

But you get the feeling, when you look at it from “down the country”, that Dublin in its Jimmy Choos has forgotten where it came from.

It seems as if Dublin has divided the rest of Ireland into three parts — there is its own catchment area, the commuter counties around the east coast; then there is “Cool Culchie Ireland”. This is made up of a few select villages on the west and south coast such as Roundstone, Kenmare and Kinsale, which are effectively Sandymount with tractors; and, finally, there is the rest of the country. The midlands and mid-west, a few mangy cities such as Limerick and Cork, that might occupy the same piece of rock as Dublin, but can’t seriously expect to be in the same league.

This attitude comes through in the way the modern culchie is portrayed. Back in the days of culchie Dublin, culchie-baiting usually went no further than a few farming references and a hint that we’re all inbred. When you consider that most people in West Cork and South Kerry have eight first names because they’re all called O’Sullivan, this is fair enough. This was affectionate ribbing though and, as in the Kerryman jokes, there was a recognition that country people were much smarter than they let on.

Now, though, culchies are pure thickos, occupying the same place on the evolutionary ladder as Cletus and Brandine in The Simpsons. The modern culchie is portrayed in the media with the subtlety of the moronic Killinaskully, King of the Culchies festival and, the cruellest cut of all, Hector O hEochagain. He is essentially a pig-in-the-parlour kind of creation, the way that Punch magazine used to represent Ireland in the past.

Seriously, if the BBC made Killinaskully or invented an Irish character like Hector, the whole country would cry “racist”, but when we do it ourselves it seems to be OK. The alternative to a rural Ireland full of diddle-iddledy idiots is in dramas such as Eden or Pure Mule, where it is shown to be the home of alcoholic depressives who live on the bog.

What nobody seems capable of doing is taking anywhere outside the capital seriously. Little did we think it at the time, but Glenroe was the last time anybody tried to show ordinary people living real lives outside of Dublin. It’s instructive to look at speculation over the root of the word culchie. There is a theory that it refers to people from Kiltimagh in Mayo, but that sounds like a theory that comes from Kiltimagh in Mayo — remember, they’re always up to something.

I’ve also heard it said that it is a short version of the word agricultural, in reference to country types who used to attend the old Agricultural Show in the RDS; that’s a runner. In fact, that nickname reflects the kind of affection that Dublin had for country people before culchie Dublin was blown away by the Celtic Tiger.

The third possible root of the word is that it comes from the Irish cul an ti, referring to the country people who worked as servants in the big houses in Dublin, which they entered at the back of the house. This explanation seems the most appropriate.

Culchies are becoming second-class citizens in Ireland. Although nobody mourns the shortage of all-day breakfasts on Ranelagh Road, when they were there they fed a strong link between the capital and the rest of the country.

In their absence, it seems that everywhere else in Ireland outside of Dublin really is beyond the Pale.

- Pat Fitzpatrick