But, like Price, Rea was headstrong, and he decided that he would rather be an unemployed Irishman than find work by sounding as if he had grown up in Surrey. After all, it was one of the great achievements of Irish civilisation to take the English language and adapt it, creating a different music. The Irish might have tended to lose in their political conflict with the British, Rea remarked, but ‘they have been triumphant in terms of the language’.
