That’s interesting. It would not have surprised me if you said Chinese, Russian, Swedish or some other non-native-English speaking person -but Irish?
I believe what you say, but I’m just surprised because I can usually tell apart broad regional accents from the UK. But then again, it might be all of the old British comedies I used to watch as a kid.
Well I’m Scottish, not Irish, but it probably amounts to the same thing for these purposes. What you read sounds fishy to me, how could anyone not tell the difference between “Noo Yawk” and “Y’all”?
My personal anecdote re the OP - my job gives me a lot of contact (i.e. almost daily phone calls + occasional trips) with a US organisation, based in Boston but with male & female staff from IIRC Chicago, Wisconsin, Minnesota & one characterful "Noo Yawk"er. To my ear the US accents are, without exception, a delight. My city (Glasgow) has long enjoyed such accents - Glaswegians adored the old '30s gangster movies so much that “guy” (as in “wise guy”) still survives in regular usage. I often use it myself, as in, “This guy walks into a bar…”
I guess this begs the question: If they can’t tell our accents apart (or even if they can) what does the “stereotypical” American sound like? A Brooklynite? A Texan? The surfers in CA?
Yup, that’s just what I meant, and I’m basing that 100% on anecdotal experience, and in a country with a. very few English-speakers and b. very few non-native speakers. So few non-Bulgarians speak Bulgarian that I just don’t think people there are very good at identifying accents, as it so rarely comes up.
For an interesting take on this, check out book 3 of Enid Blyton’s “Malory Towers” novel series, where at one point, a group of posh British schoolgirls mock the accent of an American newcomer.
I think it was Maastricht who said awhile ago that the only US regional accent she can hear is a Southern accent, and the rest meld together. I hope she does a vanity search and sees this thread.
I can’t really speak for what the “average” Irish person can distinguish, but I would think it’s more likely that the Irish person can hear the difference, but that the difference isn’t as important to the Irish person as it would be to an American person. From the point of view of the Irish person, the person has an American accent.
Can an American person hear the difference between a Cork accent and a Donegal accent? Of course they can, if they hear examples of both. But from an American point of view, both are just an “Irish accent”.
Regarding the OP - I fear all you will get is anecdotes and personal opinions. I generally find American accents attractive; people who harbour hostility or prejudice against Americans are likely to find them hateful.
(I am American)
I’ve been able to hone my ability to catch non-Atlantic Canuckistanis who have wandered south of the border - generally there are specific vowel sounds you are looking for, in a very similar way to catching people from New Jersey. For instance, I believe that I outed someone for saying “sorey” instead of “sahrey”. Now, I can’t for the life of me tell the difference between a Glasgow accent and a Cape Breton or PEI accent, though.
Or possibly Scottish or Australian. 
I find that “sorey” is a more common and telling shibboleth than “aboot,” which I’ve mostly heard only in self-parody.
This kind of conflation affects the prejudices that come many accents. From the point of view of an American in America: in both in college (a few dozen English & Irish students) and in one of my former workplaces, Cockney accents were regarded by Americans as highly distinguished and “fancy” … virtually equivalent in elegance to the speech of the England’s snootiest RP speakers 
Depends on the Americans. Back when I watched *Frasier *a billion years ago, I can recall one episode where a joke revolved around someone (Ros?) swooning over how sophisticated Daphne’s brother’s accent sounded, which IIRC was Cockney or something similarly associated with the working class. The joke wouldn’t have been funny if the audience couldn’t have been expected to recognize and distinguish the particular dialect.
Yeah, thanks to movies, PBS, and British Invasion rock I can distinguish between several different English accents and I feel I can tell the Irish from the English, but I’m not confident in my ability to distinguish between the various Scottish and Northern English accents. I know I can’t always distinguish Australians from the English either! I am getting better with New Zealand accents, thanks largely to Flight of the Conchords. If there are other New Zealand accents not represented on the show then I doubt I’d be able to place them correctly, though.
In general I think that if an American encounters someone who’s clearly a native English speaker but doesn’t have a North American accent our first guess is going to be that they’re English, both because there’s a wide variety of English accents and because there are greater odds of encountering an English person in the US than an Australian or New Zealander.
Which begs the question -can my fellow Americans correctly identify the Gieco Gecko’s accent without Googling it?
I gave up on The Wire, partly because their delivery was hard to follow when they rattled off a sentence. (Also because they were showing one episode every night so you had to keep up with it every night or you were lost).
Really? I heard that The Wire was subtitled in the UK because of the Ball-mer accent.
It may have been an option on cable/satellite. On the network TV transmission there was none.
It surprises me because it’s not the stereotypical version of that accent, which is much more exaggerated.
I would have guessed Australian, but it’s apparently plain old Cockney. It sound way too “posh” for that, compared to how the accent is usually done over here.
It’s Estuary English (but slightly toned down - not an “owllwight??” geezer-type).
Since most Americans don’t know what Estuary English is: