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McGlynn: I have quite unusual accent for an Irish person. I have what's called “flat accent.” Flat accent is an accent where you can't tell where I come from in the country. And some Irish people think that I'm English. But English people cannot hear any English accent, because my wife is English. And for example, she would say the word, hair, which I said ha-ir, and I would add R. She would say “hair.” She would remove and addﾉ Her accent is less clear than mine. Because in Ireland, it's closer to the way English would originally spoken. In fact the place in the world where English is spoken, most clearly, this is going to surprise you, is America. In America, when they traveled to, in the 16th century, the Puritan families and Protestant families came over to make a new life, a lot of the dialects remain there. So particularly in rural areas, it's closest thing we have the way English is originally spoken, they pronounce all the consonants. They don't, they might speak with funny inflection in their voice, and the Australians would be the same. So the more unusual the accent, in fact the English accent is wrong. It's today English is defined by the English accent, but the choral English, for example, so I tied back into the story, in choral English, one of the major problems that we have in Ireland, is that many of the choir are brought up to sing English with an English accent, because the choral English is not well-known in my country. Because my country is new, it was only formed in 1921. And classical music is new. It's not very popular. And it's not very well supported. So choirs sing like English choirs. So they talk like this and they go in and “they all don't speak like that.” They don't use any “R”s. They say “R”. They don't say “R”. So Anuna has done something unusual in that in order for people to appreciate the fact that we are not English choir, we sing in our own accents. So that sometimes when English choirs hear it, this is sometimes funny.

Q: So it's what you call flat accent?

McGlynn: We sing in a flat accent. We would sing in an accent where all we pronounce all the consonants.