See what happens when you leave the United Kingdom.
I didn't like to use the term "failed state", until it became useful by having become so obviously applicable to Afghanistan and Iraq once its originators had had their way with those countries. In different but no less real ways, it is also applicable in this case.
See what happens when you leave the United Kingdom.
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Schadenfreude is never becoming David. If we hadn't separated we would been a basket case any way living off handouts from the south of England.
ReplyDeleteThat's how the London media, with their sidelines in the City, think that it works. But it doesn't.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, that would just have been transfers within the United Kingdom; it wouldn't be a bailout by foreign states. And outside the euro, you would never have got into this mess. Thank goodness for Gordon Brown, who kept us out of the euro.
Also, consider how much more sensitive to working-class rural needs British politics would have had to have been if the United Kingdom had never been partitioned, and consider that the 1967 Abortion Act and the 1969 Divorce Reform Act could never have been enacted by a Parliament with a hundred Irish MPs in it.
David do really think that the Irish could have stopped an authoritarian liberal like Roy Jenkins. He never saw anything modern that he didn't like.There would have been a lot of hand wringing about the backward Irish. There would probably have been a mechanism introduced to stop Irish MPs influencing "Mainland" affairs.
ReplyDeleteI agree about the euro. I would dearly love to see Daniel O Connell on the my money again.The problem is that we are effectively tied to the Deutsche Mark. The answer is not to be tied to Stirling. Disgracefully it was never put to a referendum.
Irish independence gave us the chance to develop our own land for our own good not the good of the island to east.
Anyway didn't that old labour prime minister with a West Cork name, Jim Callaghan, have to go groveling to IMF in 1976. The UK wasn't IMF protectorate for the last thirty years.
I am no fan of the IMF, but calling it in when the need arises is no different from claiming on an insurance policy in the event of the thing insured against.
ReplyDeleteYes, if there had been such a large body of Irish MPs, then Roy Jenkins could never have become so significant a figure.
And I am not sure what you mean about land development. Ireland hardly leads the world on that score. But the loss of any large Irish voice contributed to the sidelining of the rural Radical tradition after the First World War.
The Irish people won't see a cent of this bailout money. It will go straight to the banks who will send it off to China to help create another bubble. It will be 1990's Japan revisted.
ReplyDeleteShould not the Irish now cynically leave the Euro? Denominate their debt in their own currency then devalue?
M.P., unfortunately DL is of an imperialist vent who still thinks we should still be pulling the forelock to the people in the local "bighouse", such is his perverted view of his so-called socialism.
ReplyDeleteLeaving British rule does have advantages. Ask the UK's masters in DC or even its future mistress, India.
In St Paul's, there is a monument to George Washington (someone who abjured his officer's oath to the English king) engraved with his speech describing Britain as a cruel enemy.
Such is the way that Britannia kisses her master's breeches.
Will DL support a similar memorial to Michael Collins? I doubt it.
In the years after independence the policy of the governments was developing the economy. The Shannon scheme, developing the sugar industry etc.
ReplyDeleteWhat happened in the last decade was that the government believed the hype about the "property game" and let crooks like Sean Fitzpatrick ruin the state.
Of course we haven't always been correct. Two of our nobel laureates, John Hume and Seamus Heaney, are the product of Attlee's grammar school scheme.
Listen to Evan Davis's report on the Today programme this morning or the callers to the Jeremy Vine's show if you want to know why the Brits should never have say in Irish affairs. The tone is sheer imperialism.
Well, you wouldn't want the NHS, would you...? And I don't know what you think that you can expect from the EU, of which you are now not even a colony. I am not entirely sure what the word is for your abject status in relation to it. Sadie Vacantist has it about right.
ReplyDeleteBut you have only yourselves to blame. You would insist on joining the euro, purely in order to distinguish yourselves from Britain. Adolescent behaviour.
It is quite touching to learn that someone like Paddy Pascagula is still knocking about, still sincerely believing an almost completely imaginary version of Irish history, a version no longer even considered, still less taken seriously, by anyone who knows anything.