The Irish protocol.

From your page;

One would expect the knowledge rates to be higher for a direct neighbour which a significant number of your population hold a passport for.

Presumably even YouGov recognise this, hence not polling the data in NI.

All that aside, I still find it incredibly odd to boast about lacking knowledge.....no matter how much you try and not so subtly suggest Ireland just isn't important enough to know about, not knowing the basics of a topic you discuss on a very regular basis.....well that just doesn't reflect well on you.

Edit: the article is also at odds with the direct data from YouGov, which suggests 38% of people from Great Britain know who Leo Varadkar is; https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/explore/public_figure/Leo_Varadkar?content=all

This is telling, downcow, because what it reveals is that your perception that the NI Protocol has been imposed on NI by IRL or its political leaders is the product of a political/media culture which leaves you strikingly uninformed about the politics of IRL - the (much larger) state with which NI shares this island.

No offence, but that's not a healthy media/political culture. It would be analogous to a person in IRL being similarly uninformed about the politics of it;s nearest and larger neighbour, the UK. And, to be honest, I don't think many people in IRL would be correspondingly uninformed about UK politics.

I recall a good few years ago taking a tour of Mount Stewart, the National Trust property in County Down. (You possibly know it, if your username is a clue to your whereabouts.) One of the features of the estate, apart from the main house, is the Temple of the Winds, a small but beautifully-ornamented two-story building put up in the eighteenth century for recreation, entertainment and the display of Lord Londonderry's good taste. There was a cheerful and knowledgeable guide who was able to point out the features worth noting and answer and questions you might have; a young fella of maybe 20. I suggested to him in conversation that the Temple was similar in conception and function to the Casino at Marino, erected by Lord Charlemont, and asked him if he had seen the Casino. He was very polite, but it was clear that he had never visited Dublin, and it had never even crossed his mind that he might ever do so. He seemed surprised that I might think he could ever have been in Dublin.

In my youth and ignorance, I found this astonishing. He was living about two hours drive from a cosmopolitan European capital of close on 2 million people, with world-class galleries and museums, three universities, at least a dozen theatres, a thriving night-life, etc, etc. But actually going there was simply not on his horizon. Shall we say that it gave me a new insight into the effects of partition?

Your own account of your own - I don't intend the word offensively - your own ignorance of the basics of Irish politics has struck me similarly. It's not that you're somebody who is fundamentally uninterested in political questions; I could understand it better then. But you are interested in political matters; you opened this thread to discuss the NI protocol in the context of the Act of Union, and you've expressed views about the role the Irish government played in bringing about the protocol. And yet you're ignorant of the most basic facts about the Irish government that you think has such influence over NI and its affairs. I find this astonishing and, as I have said, not a good reflection on the media/political culture in which you are living and that shapes your views.

It does, though, cast a certain light on perceptions that the NI Protocol was somehow brought about by the IRL government. It's much easier to be taken in by nonsense like this when you are so poorly-informed about the basics of politics on this island.

So DC we have two options here. The 1st option is to take you at your word that you don't know who the Taoiseach of Ireland is or the role his office plays. The logical progression from this point would be to assume that the fact you blame Irish politicians for the NI protocol is based entirely on your misunderstanding of Irish politics. So far on this thread you have stated that you blame Irish politicians for the Northern Irish protocol, while also stating that you don't know who the leader of Ireland is or what their role is. If you don't understand who the leader of Ireland is you certainly misunderstand the Northern Irish protocol, Irish politics, British politics and anglo-Irish relations.

The second option is disbelief. You're trying to prove a point to yourself and others that the republic is something so far away from Northern Ireland that it could be a south American country. This isn't being unionist, it's just pretending to be ignorant.

So which is it? Ignorant or pretending to be ignorant?

No. I wouldn't blame downcow for this state of affairs.

I don't make a special effort to find out who the Prime Minister or the Home Secretary of the UK are, or which parties are in government there, or who the First Minister of NI or the Agriculture Minister are. I don't have to; I just absorb this information from the media that I consume, the culture in which I am immersed. Facts like these are part of the common stock of information shared by anybody who takes an interest in politics in these islands. If downcow needs to go hunting to find out what office Simon Coveney occupies or who the current Taoiseach is, that's not a reflection on downcow so much as on the media/political culture that shapes his view of the world he lives in.

There was a study a few years back in the US that asked participants to nominate which broadcast and print media sources they consumed, and say how much of them they consumed, and then asked them a series of questions on current affairs - politics, culture, sport, etc. The idea was to find out whether consumption of different media sources was associated with better or worse familiarity with public affairs and events. The people who were best informed were those whose primary media source was National Public Radio; the people who were worst informed were those whose primary source was Fox News - they were worse informed than respondents who denied consuming any news media at all. And, tellingly, the more time watching Fox News they reported, the lousier their information scores were. The conclusion was that watching Fox News makes you stupider.

I don't know what news media downcow consumes. And I'm not asking; I'm sceptical that downcow's information and views come exclusively from whatever newspaper he mostly reads. As I've already suggested I think the problem is a bit wider than that; a shared partitionist mindset in which anything about IRL is simply filtered out as irrelevant unless it reinforces a useful or cherished preconception, in which case it is uncritically embraced and repeated without any particular scrutiny or understanding. Downcow may be hampered by a mindset like this, but I very much doubt that he created it.

Denizens of NI are in the happy situation that, regardless of personal identification, they can participate in whichever of the British or Irish teams they prefer.

In theory. In practice, of course, they can only participate in a team that offers them a place. The number of NI athletes who are offered places on both teams is probably not large.

I would expect any talented and ambitious athlete to jump at any chance to compete at Olympic level, and to participate in any Olympic team that will offer him or her a place, regardless of whether the team name aligns with their personal identification. And rightly so. If they find that the team's flag and anthem is not one they personally identify with, well, neither is the team's name. They shouldn't let this stop them participating in the team, any more than the team should treat this as a reason not to pick them.

And this goes equally for Irish-identifying athletes participating on a British team, or British-identifying athletes participating on an Irish team.

I have zero issue with athletes doing the above and confronted the anomalies and issues when my classmate fought in the Commonwealth games to advance his career in the only way he could. I supported his decision then and now.

He faced criticism from southern Ireland for that and from northern Ireland if he went near a tricolour. He found a middle road and a way to get support from both sides.

It isn't an issue for me how anyone declares in sport.

Well it depends on where one apportions blame; if I choose not to consult a variety of sources for my news and come away with a biased and incomplete picture, some responsibility lies with the source of course.....but I couldn't completely abdicate responsibility when I chose that source and decided to be satisfied with whatever base level of information was made available with the least effort.

Like I said, we're talking in the context of someone thinking that the actions of a state are egregiously impacting their citizenship. If I felt similarly aggrieved, I'd feel obliged to find out more information than that I passively absorbed to enable me to argue against what I perceived as a great injustice.

This applies to a lot of sports, but not so much to the Olympics, where you qualify primarily based on your world ranking. While there are limits on how many athletes can represent a country in each event (the lower the ranking, the less onerous this is), largely if you qualify for the Olympics, you would qualify regardless of the country you are going there to represent. The, 'going to Ireland with a smaller talent pool' type of thing doesn't really apply; if they weren't high enough in the world rankings to represent Team GB, they're not going to be high enough to represent Ireland unless Team GB happens to have an overwhelming overrepresentation in that discipline.

Not that this in any way detracts from the spirit of your post, which I support entirely.

Do you expect us to swallow this clearly made up story?

Apologies if this has been mentioned before as I haven't read through the entire thread..but..

I don't understand the idea about the UK shooting themselves in the foot over brexit. The bureaucracy yes, but that apparently appears to be their own doing.

Paperwork aside it appears that Brexit got exactly what they wanted - they got a free trade deal with the EU with the exception of Financial Services in the City of London which I'm sure will be resolved similarly the only other loser is the consumer who imports from the UK but commercially speaking there's no problem. If there were tariffs I presume Toyota and Nissan would have closed their plants.

Please correct me if I'm wrong but their deal is very easy to market as a win and just blame the EU for the UK's own incompetence in implementing the various paperwork issues.

TBH I hope I am wrong as whenever I do (albeit light) research into this topic they've gotten a deal that's only a step down from being a part of the free trade area.

Ireland, the country, the state, is 26 counties.

We have an aspiration to unite "all the people who share the territory of the island of Ireland in all the diversity of their identities and traditions,".

The Constitution explicitly accepts that there are different identities to Irish among the people who share the territory of the island of Ireland. The reactionary nonsense, continually promulgated by a few exclusionary nationalist posters on here, that everyone born on this island is Irish by birth is fundamentally repugnant to the Constitution.

"The level of discussion now on this thread is excellent" - Well don't post made up stories then?