Accent and Class Stus

http://www.redpepper.org.uk/scouse-a-class-accent/

Red Pepper is carrying an interview with Tony Crowley who wrote a novel on the Scouse accent and its place in society. The scouse accent for a while society viewed it as being an accent with which it carried steretypes that most notably of class and your ethnicity. Post Famine Immigration into Liverpool in the aftermath of the Irish famine had a huge impact on the development of the Scouse accent in contrast to that of the surrounding areas where the accents developed very differently.As the Scouse accent developed (surprisingly the article says only from the mid half of the twentieth century) that other accents gained a lot of privelege over that of the Scouse accent as it was then associated with crime ridden areas and other social issues. Did anything similar happen in Ireland?