I'm After Gettin' Confused With This

[gothwalk]

There is a construction in use in Hiberno-English that I'm having great difficulty in describing in grammatical terms. It's a sort of present continuous twisted to form a past tense with a negative slant, managed by inserting the word "after".

For example, if someone says "I'm after driving up from the country", then you know that not only have they driven up from the country, but they shouldn't have, or didn't need to, or the like. If someone says "What are you after doing to my bike?", then you can work out that whatever it is you did, they're not happy with it.

So, uh... is there a way to describe this pseudo-tense-thing?

Comments

[meehaneo.livejournal.com]

I was told that this is one instance of a direct translation from an Irish idiom (is that the right word?) in which a sentence in Irish begins "Tá mé tar éis ..." and so which translates literally as "I am after ...".

So it stems from the Irish language but I don't know the grammatical context.