Wednesday 4 March 2009

Sir Ted Kennedy?

Oh, why not? People who have done far more damage to this country have had it, and not just honorarily. And they haven’t done anything in the bread-and-butter interests of their own country’s working families. In cases such as that of Sir Fred Goodwin, quite the reverse, in fact.

As for Northern Ireland, well, he won in the end, didn’t he? To the victors the spoils, I suppose. He never understood the first thing about it, but that is not a peculiarly American (or Nationalist) fault.

As a result of all-round ignorance, Northern Ireland now contains at least four entirely separate societies, each of them maintained one way or another at the expense of the mainland British taxpayer: a Tory one, an Irish Catholic and Old Labour one, a Protestant fundamentalist and working-class populist one, and a Marxist one which is nevertheless obsessed with the stage-Irishness of things like the language.

None of these any longer has any parallel in the Republic. No one who matters there is still attached to the old Catholic Ireland, or ever was to Old Labour economic policy. And pretty much no one at all in interested in the Irish-speaking but Marxist Ireland envisaged by Sinn Féin, which, particularly in education, it is now busily constructing with British money within the United Kingdom.

Not that that poses any threat to the other three tribes. There are also still, for example, state schools for the Old Labour Catholics, and others for the Tories and for the Protestant fundamentalist working class. Those latter two are not formally separate from each other (not yet, anyway), but they are effectively so in the same way that middle-class and working-class state schools function as two entirely separate systems over here.

Anyone who wishes to live either in the old Catholic Ireland (but with much better social provisions) or in Sinn Féin Land should now move to Northern Ireland. If already there, they should be making every effort to ensure that Northern Ireland remains in the United Kingdom, the only country prepared to pay for either.

The Republic certainly wouldn’t.

And nor would the “Irish America” of Senator Sir Edward Kennedy.

4 comments:

  1. I thought you approved of faith schools?

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  2. Oh, if it were just the old Catholic system and the old system with Anglican, Presbyterian and Methodist clergy on the Boards, then I'd be all for it.

    But Sinn Fein is creating its own network of militantly secular Irish-language schools in direct competition with the Catholic ones, and has thrown the Protestant clergy off the new Boards as a dry run for banishing the Catholic Church from the schools throughout Ireland.

    Like the grammar schools, the old relationships with the churches were integral to the tremendous success of education of Northern Ireland. Ho, hum...

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  3. Shouldn't this apply?

    The Anti-Title Amendment
    This amendment, submitted to the States in the 11th Congress (in 1810), said that any citizen who accepted or received any title of nobility from a foreign power, or who accepted without the consent of Congress any gift from a foreign power, by would no longer be a citizen There is some debate about whether this amendment was actually ratified or not, mostly by those who put forth the fanciful notion that if it had been, most (if not all) legislators who are lawyers, and who use the title "Esquire" would no longer be citizens, and hence, no longer be able to serve in Congress.

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  4. As you say, it was never ratified.

    A knighthood is not a title of nobility, and he wouldn't have any trouble securing Congressional approval to accept it. He is hardly the first American to have it, by a very long way.

    Quite why an Irish Nationalist would accept it...

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