They have a strong thread of military culture which is more or less absent here. You'll nearly always see a few lads decked out in dress uniforms at a wedding or funeral. Their political culture is much more detached and less engaged, they don't expect their MPs to be bothering with passport applications and individuals public service issues. Governments are much more autocratic and coalitions are rarer. They're haunted by the shadow of better days, with crumbling old industrial infrastructure all over the place, vestiges of past imperial "glory", and as a result there's a thread of bitterness in their self-reflection which we don't have - e.g we seem to view the rise in immigration as a mark of progress, that our country has become desirable to live in, they view it as a symptom of decline. The royal shit, the pageantry and pomp which people would cringe at over here. In conversation there's an undertone of one-upmanship in Britain - never had someone in Ireland try to tell me how big their house was or how nice their car is on a first meeting. They have a culture of jump in and get done, and you can see it in their towns and villages. They take collective ownership of making their places look well, wheras here the tidy towns usually has an uphill struggle getting any volunteers at all.