Nonsense. It's educated 1940s and 1950s Dublin English: Charles Haughey, Garret Fitzgerald etc all spoke with the same excellent enunciation. Children of all backgrounds were explicitly taught eloquence and precision in pronunciation, and then left those schools to flourish in the workplace where their polished, impressive pronunciation clearly conveyed respect, effort and accuracy. The same holds for any grammar school boy or girl in Britain in the same period: they take positive pride in the way in which this conscious acquisition of clear, prestigious pronunciation helped them up the socio-economic ladder, despite many coming directly from disadvantage. I know a Jag-driving RP speaker, retired from success in business, who delights in seeing how his classic BBC pronunciation impresses people, and then reveals his not-so-rosy childhood in '40s and '50s East End London. It was this type of school that directly and explicitly taught him all this, a million miles from how English was spoken at home and around him. If this sort of skill was explicitly fostered in schools again, youngsters would find doors open to them easier, no matter how much we might pooh-pooh it.

@@londoncalling151 Fitzgerald conceivably had a similar accent but Charles Haughey's pompous tones were nothing like that. His was a curious "faux-culchie" accent, no doubt cultivated to appeal to the Irish common man, famously described as the sort of person who "has his dinner in the middle of the day". There is no single "Dublin accent". There are a spectrum of accents in the Irish capital, and at the extremes are both hideous. The harshest working class accent in which spurious extra syllables are inserted into vowel sounds and many consonants are dropped (eg "Goin' dowin towin on the Dar' from Booherstowin") is exceeded only in discordant horror by the upper middle class whine variously and erroneously described as the D4 or Dort accent "Gaying dine tine on the Dort from Beeterstine" In between either extreme there are some very pleasant variants of English, in many ways the nicest of which is that typically spoken by former pupils of the likes of Wesley College, St Columba's, and High School. Not all pupils of these "protestant ethos" schools were Protestants. Some were Jews and quite a lot were Catholics but the accent that typified those schools, while essentially a middle-class one, tended to indicate that someone was of Protestant background. Or Jewish :) A more recent example of a prominent person with that accent is the Jewish former Justice Minister Alan Shatter. Now a lot of people thought Shatter usually spoke a lot of nonsense. But he did speak it very nicely.

The Hertzog family is from Ireland