But you don’t matter a damn

Sir PTerry summarised Ireland quite succinctly with his “a place that merely exists so that people can come from it.”

Like with the electricity:
Interconnect to Republic of Ireland can carry 0.5GW
Interconnect to France can carry 4GW

Still lovely place and people.

“Irish students leave school with the historical and emotional weight baggage of colonisation on their shoulders.”

What happened is also the history of hundreds of similar relationships between countries/tribes since time began. Its worth understanding but what happened but has to be kept in context and the Irish need to realise they aren’t exceptional.

I can’t avoid plays, novels and poetry dealing with our complicated relationship with Britain

Having taken less that a generation to effectively discard the religion and associated morality that have set their values for over a millennium moaning about the British is pretty much all that’s left. They’re hardly going to draw attention to any consequences of the recent introduction of the new-Irish are they?

Oh, unless you’re descended from the evil oppressors of Winchester of course. In which case you should be suitably humble & apologetic.

Jonathan @ 7.37: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD0BcQTIr4c.

Small country with no significant achievements (Dana winning Eurovision maybe) jealous of bigger, (once) successful country next door. Bit like Canada and the US. Or most of Europe and UK. Fuck it, the rest of the world and the UK.

Better to have been great than never great at all perhaps?

Having taken less that a generation to effectively discard the religion and associated morality that have set their values for over a millennium moaning about the British is pretty much all that’s left. They’re hardly going to draw attention to any consequences of the recent introduction of the new-Irish are they?

Come In, Ye Blacks and Tans.

@Steve
“Come In, Ye Blacks and Tans.”

Very nice! LOL and coffee spray.

There is no Ireland, it’s just a minor satrapy of toytown austria-hungary, which is what the Irish appear to want.

Best of luck paddy!

Dublin was a major slave-trading centre (biggest in Western Europe) where English, Scots and Welsh captured by Viking raiders were sold on to the continent. One of the things that led to the English getting involved in the first place – though ties across the Irish Sea didn’t start with that, the Gaelic kingdom of Dál Riata included parts of what’s now Ulster and Scotland while the Scandinavian kingdoms of Dublin and York shared the same king. Did the slave trade in Brits get covered in History of Irish Oppression lessons?

Plenty of other parts of the UK suffered war, oppression and even pretty brutal ethnic cleansing: wouldn’t have wanted to be a Danish speaker living in the Danelaw when the Anglo-Saxons got it back, the Scandinavian raiders were really not pleasant people, and even collective terms like “Anglo-Saxon” or “Celts” hides how much bloodshed there was between different subgroups.

Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland didn’t all start out fully-formed. They became what they are and occupy the borders they now do because a whole soup of people (and in all four cases that includes Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Scandinavians and Normans, albeit in different proportions) fought over them, settled in them, and influenced the culture and law. If Northumbria, in its traditional wider borders that encompassed parts of what’s now Scotland and much of Northern England, had managed to become an independent state again, I’m sure they’d have plenty of tales of woe in their history lessons about their sufferings at the hands of Scots, rival Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, Scandinavian raiders and then the Normans inflicting the Harrying of the North and Henry VIII’s Council of the North persecuting the locals for their Catholicism.

It’s fair to say the situation in Ireland stayed bloodier for longer – had Henry VIII not sought a divorce and the Scots not embraced Calvinism, so the religious divide with Ireland hadn’t arisen, it’s conceivable that Irish-British relations would have taken a very different path. But there does seem a popular myth of Ireland as completely separate from Britain in the post-Roman to early medieval era, before the English/British invaded and inflicted unprecedented misery.

“England” itself was barely post-embryonic at that time and its borders and culture were by no means fixed yet – a more successful conquest of Ireland might have led to it being as “English” as Cornwall or the bits of Northumbria that didn’t end up in Scotland, or at least as “British” as Wales. In retrospect we look back at the Anglo-Normans and Welsh-Normans as a bunch of foreign invaders (and therefore oppressors) of Ireland, but that’s partly because we know it didn’t work out. So we judge those same elites differently to their presence in England, where they were still foreign and still in many ways oppressors, but ultimately succeed at becoming “English” and setting what “England” means. Ireland’s current national identity is based on their failure there, and the compounded and bloody failure of their political successors. So I do understand Irish history lessons having the flavour they do, but for teaching the history of the British Isles more broadly the Irish experience is just one piece of a wider puzzle, and a difficult perspective to make much sense of the rest from. Particularly when looking at state formation in the pre-reformation era, unless teachers in eg Brum are to be encouraged to see things through the lens of Mercian independence and identity being crushed by the tyranny of the Wessex imperialists.

As I keep saying, my Irish grandfather was of the view that “All Irish history is lies”.

Here’s a question to which I don’t know the answer. ” … the religion and associated morality that have set their values for over a millennium”: is that true? By which I mean did Roman Catholicism have a continuous grip of Ireland from 1054 onwards (that being the year when the Roman Catholic Church flounced out from orthodox Catholicism)?

I ask because it seems that the grip of Roman Catholicism in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland was not continuous. The RC church had become terribly feeble throughout Scotland which was why the Scottish Reformation was damn near bloodless. But the Kirk couldn’t train Gaelic-speaking ministers fast enough to reform the Hs & Is. The latter had essentially tumbled down into paganism. Roman Catholicism was eventually reintroduced to the Outer Isles and bits of the Inner Isles and west coast by Jansenist missionaries sailing from Ireland.

So it occurs to me: did Ireland, or at least parts of Ireland, suffer the same fate? Did it need the Counter-Reformation to reconvert it to Roman Catholicism? If such a thing happened I’ve never seen it mentioned. But then it wouldn’t be mentioned, would it, according to the maxim of my granddad. Like the post-independence civil war, perhaps?

This is probably true of every small country sitting next to a big country. Canadians and Americans jump to mind. Canadians think about Americans a lot, whereas Americans barely notice Canada. Finns probably think about Russia more than Russians think about Finns. Etc.

had Henry VIII not sought a divorce and the Scots not embraced Calvinism, so the religious divide with Ireland hadn’t arisen, it’s conceivable that Irish-British relations would have taken a very different path.
For some reason my post above this one seems to arrived about an hour late (bloody internet here I would think) But we seem to have come to the same question from opposite directions. Point is, without the Calvinist influence would England have been the same country? I suspect the history of a Catholic England up until the C18th would have been more like France. So the American colonies played out differently? A later Industrial Revolution? If at all?

They love a moan, don’t they, the Paddies? You’d think we only took the boot off their throats last Wednesday, rather than 100 years ago.

@bis

Interesting innit?

“The UK’s involvement with Ireland has always cost it far more than it gained.”

I think @Nick points out that it wasn’t just a land grab by the elites, although that was certainly a big part of why the Normans got involved – along with the Dublin slave trade, which peaked in the 11th century, so isn’t any more “ancient history” than the Anglo-Norman invasion was. Even if you view the slave raiding as a mere excuse for a land grab, you’d have to concede England had just been their mother of Norman land grabs, so it isn’t as if Ireland was getting unusually shoddy treatment from them.

But once the religious realignment placed Scotland and England in isolation from much of the Continent, and left Ireland on the other side, then Ireland had the misfortune to become a potential threat disproportionate to its size, population (actually quite large, relatively – often about a third to a half of England’s) and wealth. Would be all too easy for the French or Spanish to use Ireland as a base to threaten Britain from. So after that point it became increasingly difficult for the British to let go of their grip. The fact that elites didn’t want to lose land holdings and Protestant solidarity meant there’d be an outcry if their co-religious in Ireland had been left to their fate would be factors too, but the Continental threat really concentrated minds. To a large extent, Britain’s “gains” in Ireland were really about security and the prevented What Ifs, rather than because Britain was extracting Ireland’s limited riches.

I was shocked at how history was taught in so much of a narrower way when my son went to school and the focus on first half of 1900’s, it’s almost as if they wanted people to forget about the past so they could bring it back up and make them feel extra guilty as they could skip over the bits about abolishing slavery etc and just do the evil bits.
Similar with moving to Canada when I found out knew more about the history as it related to First Nations and had a much broader view than many Canadians. That’s why they can raise so much outrage as this is ‘new’ to many people

The population of Ireland is about that of Greater Yorkshire. So, what portion of British education about literature, history or anything else should be devoted to that of Yorkshire?

Belgium has twice as many people as Eire, a considerably larger GDP and is almost as close, geographically. But the only thing I remember learning about Belgian history is Waterloo.

@rhoda

“Isn’t it time we ditched the Common Travel Area and mutual voting rights”

At least British citizens in Ireland can vote in both general and local elections there. Unlike EU citizens, they aren’t allowed to vote in EU elections – which given the extent to which Ireland is ruled from Brussels, though not so much from the Parliament there, you might consider a bit of a glitch.

To be honest I’d rather we got rid of right of Commonwealth citizens to vote in the UK, if those countries don’t allow British citizens to vote – Australia ditched in it 1984 for example (though grandfathering in the right to vote for Brits who lived there before), but they can vote here. Make it mutual or bin it.

The UK getting rid of the right to vote for Irish citizens would create a lot of trouble with Washington and Brussels, since the Good Friday Agreement has locked the UK into allowing NI’s nationalist community to partake in civil life while rejecting UK citizenship. I’m not sure if you could claim you were sticking to the GFA if you accepted the voting rights for Irish citizens in NI but not for ones living in GB, but I imagine it’d still cause a row we could do without. What strikes me as odd about the whole set-up is that in a way the exemption for Irish to do things that otherwise UK (or Commonwealth) citizens can do, for example voting, joining the armed forces and taking certain roles in the Civil Service, is basically treating Irish as “little British” still. In that sense it’s rather patronising, and demeans the idea of the Republic of Ireland being a clean break from the British-dominated past. Nevertheless, Irish people would also dislike it if these exemptions were to be ended…

The bitterness and hate of the Irish is a product of realising the mistake they made by murdering their way to independence whilst becoming poorer and less significant.

Awful, spiteful, nasty people.

Ireland has a land border with the UK. France does not, So Ireland is our nearest neighbour until either Northern Ireland switches to being part of the Republic, or King Charles reclaims Normandy.

For one definition of ‘nearest’, perhaps. On the same principle, Russia is the third nearest country to the US, because it’s only a few miles from Alaska, but most USians don’t think of it as such. For the majority of the UK population, France is physically closer to where they live than Eire.