John Bull's Other Island

Twice in as many days, Paddy Pascagula comments here to prove that, if anything, the Irish Republic would find it even harder to assimilate Northern Nationalists than to assimilate Unionists. The Paddy Pascagulas of this world would be rather like hopelessly unrealistic third, fourth or fifth generation colonial returnees to Britain from Africa or India.

They never know anything the real history of Ireland, rather than the fantasy largely devised and propagated by a man who was barely Irish at all; this week, PP has treated us to a theory about the Potato Famine otherwise confined to Sinéad O'Connor, and to a jaw-droppingly ignorant claim about voting rights before the Union. They are no more typically or normally Irish than it is typically or normally British to march through the streets behind a Union Flag while wearing a bowler hat. Speaking of the Union Flag, that red saltire on it was, and is, no word of lie. The Irish were vigorous participants in British imperialism, and especially in its military aspects. It was under that Flag, and by those means, that they propagated the Faith to the ends of the earth.

Ireland is an English-speaking country with a Common Law system and an array of utterly English institutions created by or as a result of the Act of Union, the best thing that ever happened to Ireland, which incorporated one of the most backward countries in Europe into what became in the nineteenth century the most advanced country in the world, an advance not least by the efforts of Irish Catholic labourers throughout the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The consequent improvements in Ireland's agriculture, industry, education, infrastructure, welfare provision, honest and responsible administration, and so on, were almost incalculable, and enjoyed the strongest possible support of the Catholic Church, without which many, most or even all of them could not have happened, especially at local level. They still exist, their fundamental Englishness as immediately recognisable as ever. Why, even the only Established Church in Ireland's history was an Anglican one, however few people might have been in it.

Likewise, the Irish language is only still spoken at all thanks to the efforts of Anglo-Irish aristocrats and of Protestant clergymen (there remains at least one very Protestant, very Unionist clergyman who is active in its cause in Northern Ireland today), and it is now much more secure within the United Kingdom than outside, as surely as are Catholic schools and as surely as is the protection of the child in the womb, both of which are doomed in what the Republic has now become. Accurate figures are notoriously difficult to obtain, but probably half of Irish-speakers, and well over half of voluntary learners of the language, are in Northern Ireland.

And speaking of Anglo-Irish aristocrats, they haven't gone away, you know. They have been biding their time, partly over here, but by no means entirely so. Tiocfaidh ár lá, indeed. And now, that day has come, and with it its man, George Osborne, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat. Even a bailout by the EU would actually be a bailout by the United Kingdom, which is a net contributor to the EU. But a direct British bailout would have much more sensitive conditions attached, because we are family. Either way, though, the Irish economy is about to find itself subject to direct supervision and scrutiny by the British State, as such.

As Alistair Darling put it on The World At One, "What happens in Ireland is obviously of the utmost interest to the rest of the United Kingdom". Economically, and indeed culturally, that has always been precisely correct. There must be almost, if almost, as many people who do or could hold Irish passports in Great Britain as the entire population of the 26 Counties. Ninety years, or thereabouts, is not very long in the great scheme of things. About as long as, for example, the Union between Norway and Sweden. I am not predicting the formal reincorporation of the 26 Counties into the United Kingdom. But the only available alternative is permanent economic, including budgetary, supervision and scrutiny from London, whether directly or, as a sort of pretence for dignity's sake, indirectly. Would simply coming home, a home which you have never entirely left, really be any worse than that?