culturalmarxist:

i literally don’t think i learnt anything about irish history at school, other than a few references during tudor times or the IRA. it’s a very coy way of painting the history of irish independence as ‘okay, sure, we did conquer ireland but that was like 600 years ago and it’s a bit silly to keep harping on it now’ without ever having to actually say it out loud.

i’m just about old enough to remember when bins were removed from lakeside to assuage fears about the IRA planting bombs (probably an over-reaction really). you can’t ignore the ‘Irish question’ (maybe having irish relatives does factor into that?) but by ignoring the history between England and Ireland (and Wales and Scotland) it’s a very effective way of making the other side look histronic. 

eta: it was reading about the colonialisation of America, and how the treatment of indigenous peoples was first practised (in both senses of the word) during the Irish campaigns that really made me realised how fucked up the relations in the British Isles actually are.

Yeah, we had a kid who grew up in England join us in second year, and that was essentially his summation of what he’d learned about Ireland too. “We used to own them, something happened, now we don’t”.

Obviously your school did it for the same reasons mine did, it’s fairly embarrassing. And there really isn’t enough time in the world to teach kids about all the horrible things Britain did over the past 600 years. But Ireland seems like an especially weird thing to leave out, as last I checked, nobody was removing any bins because of Partition, you know?

And to foreigners, I realise that probably sounds like a really small, inconsequential thing, but it’s genuinely quite disconcerting when you first encounter it. Covent Garden is roughly the same size as my home town, yet has probably 1/4 of the number of bins. I come from a relatively large town in Ireland with a population of about 10,000, whereas Covent Garden is one of the largest tourists traps in London and sees millions of people each day. If you buy a drink there, you will most likely be carrying the bottle around with you for the rest of the day. There are simply no bins. Nor are there post boxes. That’s how big a deal this was. Yet it’s never mentioned.

And it really kind of shows, even if it’s only in other, equally small ways. Like, when people talk about Thatcher they’ll bring up the Falklands or hardcore Conservatism, or if they’re more old school Labour types the whole Milk Snatcher thing. But no one mentions the Troubles. It’s not even that her tenure saw a massive escalation in the violence within Northern Ireland itself, the IRA tried to kill her, repeatedly. Northern Ireland was hugely influential on her and her policies, but that never gets mentioned.

I think, though I’d have to check my numbers again, that something in the region of 10 cabinet ministers and their partners were killed by the IRA during her tenure, on English soil. Not in Northern Ireland mind, actually within the borders of England proper. Can you imagine if 10 members of Congress were killed by a more militant faction of the Tea Party during Obamas tenure? He would be beaten with that stick throughout the ages.