Anti-British Xenophobia and Hatred in Ireland

I always wondered how the total lunatic independents (like the infamous "Jobs not Condoms" guy from the 90s) got any votes at all, but now I know! 😂

What reason would you have to say SF are competent? Their record up north is far from stellar.

Proportional representation. The exact system used to achieve that is more or less irrelevant. But - kudos on the sidetrack.

Yes, it's not really realised that Ireland was regarded as troublesome second class colony in the 19th century and a long way from being an equal of England. They were very much in the colonial mindset and the 'united kingdom' was united only in the sense that everyone accepted that England was top dog.

Anti-Irish racism and depicting Irish people as ape-like was the absolute norm.

What do you mean. How were we closer.

That old ape cartoon that was posted, really reminds me what a bunch of brutish savages our forebears were <shudder>.

Thanks heavens we have had the British as neighbours to civilise us, set our feet on the long path to progress.

We're damn lucky they didn't just eradicate us - in fairness they had hope in their hearts we could do better with some positive instruction and guidance.

And look at the country now! The voting system may be confusing and inefficient, not be First Past the Post as God ordains, but maybe that can be fixed with a referendum.

There was plenty of food in the country (and plenty more exported) problem was that most people couldn't afford it and the government didn't want to know.

You have to remember the poverty of the Irish Catholic population was a deliberate policy aim of the UK government, as expressed in the penal laws. The aim was to reduce the majority of the Irish population into a desperately poor, subsistence existence and the penal laws were very successful at achieving that result. In such circumstances, an event like the famine was merely a matter of time.

As you say, potato blights and crop failures were common. They had occurred in Ireland before. In such times, to prevent unrest, the Irish parliament had closed ports to prevent the export of food forcing its sale in Ireland to mitigate the worst effects of the potato crop failure. After the act of union in 1800, the legislative power moved to London where politicians were ideologically convinced of the purity of free markets and free trade. So when the crops failed in the 1840s a) The majority of MPs couldn't care less. Ireland was a foreign country in their minds. Some UK civil servants, like Trevelyan, considered the famine to be a good thing. b) To the extent they did consider the problem, preventing exports from Ireland was ideologically impossible for them.

However, the malicious indifference of the UK political aristocracy of the 19th century isn't a good reason to harbour grudges against the British generally or the English specifically in the 21st century. The same UK political aristocracy unleashed a heavy cavalry charge against 60,000 English people protesting for parliamentary reforms in 1819, killing 18 unarmed people in the "Battle of Peterloo". We were all victims of the same regime.

That’s pretty meaningless considering the vast majority of that 8 million people were living in extreme poverty on half acre plots of land.

Population size is misleading. We were no where near militarily putting it up to the Brits in the 19th century .

The huge population of the 19th century did make a huge impact and enhance massively the US diaspora. Which is crucial to our soft power. Something that dumbfounds the Brits to this today.

I wonder about the British education system. A large number of their society seen to be knuckle daggers.

"...If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.."

This happened all over the world. Indigenous people pushed off their own land. Was culturally acceptable at that time. What's surprising that it went on for so long and still reverberates in NI. Yet there's almost no awareness of this British history in Britain.