Is the kind of class snobbery that ridiculed Carole Middleton for saying 'toilet' and not 'lavatory' alien to Ireland, asks Kate Holmquist.
'Doors to manual" - how will the world's most famous never-to-be-mother-in-law live down the nickname that Prince Williams's Hooray Henry pals gave her? Former flight attendant Carole Middleton has allegedly chewed gum at public engagements, asked to use the toilet rather than the lavatory, betraying her as a middle-class social climber - or so the Palace supposedly told the tabloids.
Should the Kates and Williams of Ireland's new social aristocracy worry about how their manners, or more especially their parents' manners, may betray them? It used to be so easy - at the top were the doctors' families, the legal profession and the Protestants with horses (the Anglo-Irish). At the bottom the farmers and the council-estate shell-suit wearers.
Now we've got drug dealers with horses and hospital consultants complaining that €205,000 a year isn't enough.
"It's depressing to think that in the 21st century we are still being judged by whether we say loo or lavatory or toilet," says Puffin Moynihan, who says "lavatory" or "loo" and owns a PR company with a prestigious client list.
Melanie Morris, editor of Image magazine, who says "loo", comments: "I'm all for manners. I was at the VIP Style Awards dinner this week sitting with Miriam Ahern and her new boyfriend, Terry McCoy, and he has impeccable manners - standing up when a woman leaves the table, opening doors and so on. I think it doesn't matter what background you come from, if you have been taught manners from an early age it will stand to you. I've met a lot of young people from working class backgrounds who have good manners - the girls are charming and the boys are honourable - and this makes them hugely popular with their peers."
We like to think that Irish society is classless, and pigeon-holing people as the children of medical, legal, culchie or council-estate families is seen as bad form.
The daughter of a well-known political family, who prefers not to be named, says that growing up she was unaware of social class. "Today I think it's all about money and ostentatious display, but it has opened things up. In the past, only professionals were allowed in to golf clubs, whereas now anyone who wants to play can join a club."
David McWilliams, who says "loo" and will appear from the Cliffs of Moher on Good Morning America next week talking about Ireland, believes that the political parties are all the same, with no extremes of right or left, because they can see that Ireland has become broadly "middle class".
But when he was growing up in Dún Laoghaire in the 1970s, there was a rigid "respectocracy" of professionals - the bank manager, the doctor, the insurance broker - similar to Madame Bovary's French petit bourgeoisie. Now, "we're living in Connecticut with shitty weather" - not to mention the Dort accent.
Not on your life. "Ireland is not remotely classless," says anthropologist Jamie Saris, a Harvard-educated American who teaches at NUI Maynooth. When he first came to Ireland in the 1980s, he was visited by a classmate who happened to be the scion of a US family whose name is synonymous with wealth. "He said that Ireland was his first experience of overt social class." We may like to think that we have achieved the faux egalitarianism of the US, but we don't come close, Saris believes.
Restaurants charging silly money for food that would cost half that in any other European city get away with it simply because people want to be seen to be spending their money, Saris believes: "Ireland is a country gone rabid on displays of opulence." Last summer, the residents of a seaside caravan park in Co Wicklow were astonished when one family began travelling by helicopter to and from the site. "Everyone stood around and watched," says one who witnessed this.
People are still talking about Sinead Kelly's 21st birthday party at the Four Seasons hotel when Girls Aloud were flown in. Rosanna Davison - the Catholic Paris Hilton - has VIP magazine in a dither about her web-antics and tabloid strutting. A posh girls' school on Dublin's southside has had to hire a traffic director to keep the yummy mummies' 4x4s in line.
A woman who was a guest at Ronan Keating's house-warming party says she was invited by a friend of Keating's, even though she didn't know the singer. "There are people throwing lavish parties who are not sure who to invite, so they get their friends to invite people they've never actually met before," she says.
Another in-the-know socialite says that people are snubbing extravagant display, with the narrow Catholic upper-middle-class refusing to let anyone in who smells of freshly minted cash. "If we did invite them to dinner parties, what would we talk to them about?" she asks.
"D4" is now a term of derision meant to refer to girls whose fathers drive them to school in convertible Bentleys and take six sun holidays a year. The essential class signifiers for the newly filthy rich include swimming pools, stables, racing cars, home entertainment centres the size of rural cinemas and going to the "right" schools. A villa in Marbella is now "for knackers" - it has to be Barbados and, ideally, Sandy Lane, one observer said.
She added, "Anybody under 35 doesn't even know who Kate Middleton is. Irish girls all want to be Paris Hilton and living in Beverly Hills - not Buckingham Palace." Now the new trend, said one pundit, is for the children of the very rich to feel embarrassed about it and stop bringing friends home, lest they see the home cinema and the five-port garage, not to mention the heli-pad.