“Are you happy to be free?”
The shop assistant stares at me blankly, totally unaware that what she has just asked has sent my mind into overdrive.
“Sorry?” I stammer, hoping to have picked her up wrong. But again I am met with the same unmoving delivery of the same confusing question: “Are you happy to be free?”
I don’t know whether to laugh or feel insulted at the idea that I would be happy to be anything but free. Moments ago this girl was just a person I had never met before standing in a shop on Oxford Street. All I had asked of her was directions to the soap aisle but upon hearing my accent she took it upon herself to ask me this rather unsettling question.
After some hesitation I reply: “I guess so. Yes. But I’ve never known anything else.”
I am met with blankness.
“Neither have my parents,” I try.
Nothing.
"Because Ireland has not been ruled by England for almost 100 years?"
“Oh.”
This is not the first time I’ve had the independence of my country questioned since moving to London ten weeks ago. While awkwardly fumbling with English coins, I’ve found myself explaining to shopkeepers that I’m still getting used to the currency, and the response is often the same: “Don’t you have pounds in Ireland?”
I’ve met perfectly intelligent people who’ve told me they would love to visit my country but fear it is still “too dangerous”.
And on one occasion, I even had to leave a newsagent’s without the stamps I had gone in for as the man behind the counter failed to comprehend that Ireland is not “in England”.
We’ve all seen clips of American TV correspondents being corrected on their belief that Ireland is part of the UK, and although I cannot totally forgive their misunderstanding of our politics (especially in a professional context), I can accept that they are on the other side of the Atlantic and therefore, geographically at least, are at a remove from us.
But London is only an hour from Dublin, and no matter which side of the Irish Sea you are on or what opinions you hold politically, there is little denying that the histories of our countries are linked. The basics should be understood.
But while we learned at school about British rule, Michael Collins and 1916, it seems like students here were told to skip their version of that chapter as it wasn't relevant enough to be examined on.
And while we were kept relatively up to date with the goings on of our neighbours, many here chose to block out any semblance of Ireland which conflicts with the image of a green island emblazoned with pints, priests and a parochial mindset.
Will we ever really be free of the stereotypes which envelop us in the eyes of others, even those so geographically close as the English?
I cringe politely as people tell me how much I must love drinking Guinness and tea and inform me that “everyone in Ireland gets drunk before pulling out their musical instruments and dancing all night in the pubs”.
I by no means expected the British to commemorate the Easter Rising as it has been back at home over this past week. But until moving here I never realised just how out of sync the history books of our nations really are.
