Shoneenism is a pejorative term, used in Ireland from at least the 18th century, to describe Irish people who are viewed as adhering to Anglophile snobbery.
[1] Some late 19th and early 20th century Irish nationalist writers, like D. P. Moran (1869–1936), used the term shoneen (Irish: Seoinín),[2][3] alongside the term West Brit, to characterize those who displayed snobbery, admiration for England or mimicked the English nobility.
Published in 1910, Patrick Weston Joyce's work English as We Speak it in Ireland, defines a "shoneen" as "a gentleman in a small way: a would-be gentleman who puts on superior airs", noting that the word is always "used contemptuously".
[10] In Writers and Politics: Essays and Criticism, a series of essays published by Conor Cruise O'Brien in 1965, O'Brien noted that advocates of a particular form of Irish nationalism, including D. P. Moran, would describe those who were deemed not to be an "Irish Islander" as either "a West Briton, if of Anglo-Irish descent, or a shoneen if of Gaelic ancestry".
[12] In 2017, the Irish Court of Appeal's judge Gerard Hogan reportedly described a preference in legal circles to refer to the European Convention of Human Rights, instead of the Constitution of Ireland, as a "sort of legal shoneenism".