It was, it must be said, a drink-related incident, but that doesn't mean it wasn't annoying. As soon as the pubs closed, nothing but chips would do us, and the only place nearby was a kebab shop. Half of south Co Dublin had the same idea, and on this particular night it happened to be the male half - except for me and my two female friends.
As quantity rather than quality becomes very important at that time of night, everybody seemed to be ordering dishes that involved roasting half-cows over the flame of a Bic lighter, and the queue was moving about as quickly as the Kinnegad tailback of yore. Which gave the man beside us plenty of time to polish his chat-up techniques.
His numero uno target was my terribly attractive friend, and his approach to romance was that beloved of so many Irish men - extreme belligerence. "Chips, is it?" was repeated several times in her ear, until she, being a particularly nice as well as attractive person, said something along the lines of "Yes, chips it is."
What jubilation was his! "Oh, you're English", he pointed out with great acuity and went on to mumble his way through several questions about whether she liked Ireland, interspersed with such statements as "You see, we're very fond of the chips in Ireland, none of your English pasties or butties here". She tried a few times to point out that she'd lived here for over seven years, which implied that, yes, she liked Ireland but also that she had some knowledge of the local eating habits.
He wasn't having any of it and continued in the same vein until I got rather annoyed - not because he was bothering us, which is an accepted hazard of late-night chip raids, but because he just wouldn't accept that my friend could have any perceptions about a country she had lived in for a considerable portion of her 26 years.
More fool me, because when I did my rather drunken schoolmarm impression and tried to point this out, he turned a sceptic's eye on me and said: "Well, you're not exactly Irish yourself."
"What?" I said. "With a voice like that, you're not trying to tell me you're Irish?" he said over one shoulder as he turned back to my friend. My subsequent hissy fit was probably out of all proportion to his remark - he was undoubtedly just trying to get his chip-shop seduction back on course. The poor fool didn't know I've had a lifetime of comments like this and that it was the one thing guaranteed to send me into an Exorcist-style head-spinning rage.
It's not that my accent is English exactly, it's just that it's not particularly Irish. Or rather it's not any particular Irish accent: my inflections are neither Tipperary nor Cavan, nor Dublin 4 nor DART. It is less Received Pronunciation than pronunciation that nobody was around to sign for.
There's no real cause for my somewhat Anglicised vowels. I was born in Ireland, as were my parents and grandparents before me. I went to a mixed bag of a comprehensive school. I'm a Protestant, true, but of the bank clerk/shop-owner tradition rather than the mad-as-a-brush/Anglo-Irish ascendancy tradition. It would be one of those nice Irish anomalies, my voice, if it were not for the fact that all too often it seems to mark me out as not Irish at all.
Throughout my life, I have been asked where I come from, which is a perfectly reasonable question. The way a person speaks has always been used as a way of placing them - their social bracket, their country, their county, their religious allegiance. It's not particularly fair, especially as placing somebody can often mean placing a prejudice against somebody. But we all do it.
So when an indistinct accent like my own comes along, it's only natural people want to know what the nuances are that escape them. But it is people like our chip-shop friend - and there are many more where he came from - that are the problem. To them, an accent like mine means I'm not really Irish.
Anybody I have challenged on it usually backs down, looking uncomfortable, or ignores me completely (chip-shop Lothario) or says something like "Ah, well, you know what I mean". The sad thing is that in a way, I know exactly what they mean. Although I have always felt Irish, I have also felt not quite Irish enough. If being Irish means being a fluent Irish speaker, or following Gaelic games compulsively or knowing all the words to Danny Boy, I'm not Irish.
If it means knowing the Liberties like the back of my hand or knowing every hedgerow in Offaly or knowing a Montenotte accent, then I'm not Irish. I never used to think that these things precluded me from my own nationality - I foolishly thought that being born somewhere entitled me to it. But I had underestimated the compulsive Irish need to fetishise our own culture, to praise something just because it is considered exclusively Irish. Admittedly, I have recently stopped flying off the handle about it, unless chip shops and drink come into the equation. Using the simple rationale that I have to be Irish because I'm not anything else, I have decided not to be quite so touchy. Most people are probably not really saying I'm not Irish - it is just that, as a society, we are not yet able to encompass all the different experiences of being Irish.
Still, it does make me worry about the refugees and immigrants currently trying to settle here and about their children in years to come. A piece by Kitty Holland in this paper last week pointed out that many people in this country feel both Irish and (say) Asian or African. I don't envy them trying to argue their case with that man in the chip shop.