@ Neesy: It depends on where you go and which section of society you come across. It's a generalization, and definitely doesn't always hold true, but you can go to certain 'nice' areas and have everyone act like you're something they've scraped off their shoe (but they're pretentious middle-class so-and-sos). Equally, you can go to some other areas and have the locals shun you because you don't 'fit' (the middle and upper-middles will say they're working class areas; being from the working class, I can tell you they're actually 'underclass' areas - and working class folk from just a few streets away won't be any more welcome (less, if anything)).
But people are mostly OK from wherever they are in these fair(ish) isles.
Brit army and Irish gfs, you say? Risky. Not forbidden, but...frowned upon. By both sides.
Little anecdote: my dad was a military policeman over there in the early 70s. He got a call out - incident in one of the married quarters. They found another MP with half his head splashed up the wall. His Irish wife of 3 weeks said he'd been cleaning his pistol when it went off. Oddly the pistol bore no fingerprints. The other soldiers knew her story was BS and also knew what must have happened, but there was no proof so she was free to go. She bounced over the border into the Republic, and the subsequent investigation duly found that the vetting process had failed for some reason (my dad's theory was that this MP had slipped someone a few quid, as he knew the bloke was mental about this girl). One of her uncles had pretty strong connections to PIRA. So, you know. Risky.
(Incidentally, while you wouldn't necessarily expect it, my dad's always said that the Irish are generally friendly and easy enough to get on with. He was very keen to impress that upon me while I was growing up, to even out the stuff I saw on the news and heard him and my uncles talking about - and notwithstanding the fact that he'd been blown through Woolworth's window in Belfast by a car bomb.)
As for the rugby, though...the French missing that easy pen near the end wasn't a shock. Congrats to Ireland, but...the French hate us even more than the Scots, Welsh and Irish do (and tbh, that's saying something). Anyone but England, eh?
(Even though it should be borne in mind that we're all fairly well mixed up at this point: I've got Scottish and Irish ancestry going back no more than 3-4 generations, as the vast majority has by now.)
