It is a common display of outrage; an American reporter called an Irish actor British! Cue national outrage now!
We hate being called British, we furiously resent people not knowing where the Northern Irish border lies, we drum up fury at the suggestion of our commonality and yet the connection between the UK and Ireland is unavoidably there.
Actually it is right there, just past Dundalk and signalled by a ping on your phone to say welcome to the UK, the existence of British territory on the island of Ireland is announced.
For Michéal Martin,leader of Fianna Fáil since 2011, “it’s natural, it’s instinctive, it’s in our DNA” the desire to have one over on the British.
From the way the government handled last Monday’s leaked Brexit deal proposal, prematurely dancing to the Boomtown Rats as Arlene Foster fumed, the worry is that the importance of UK relations to Ireland, gets lost in the desire to put a dent in the steel toed boot of Britain.
But is the question mark over our post-colonial identity still so painfully etched in bold that we continue to do anything to separate ourselves from the British, even at the cost of our own prosperity?
“Ireland needs Britain, and the result of a hard Brexit would be the loss of thousands of jobs…but the awareness of just how bad a hard Brexit would be for Ireland hasn’t come into the Irish consciousness yet” said Martin.
“I think the back channels have weakened between Britain and Ireland” said Martin, commenting that instead of the personal relations Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair and other leaders before them, what we are witnessing now is more “megaphone diplomacy, that plays well at home…but we want to sell to Britain after Brexit. We are not independent in economic terms, we use their ports and their markets”.
We have a long and difficult Brexit road ahead according to the leader of Fianna Fáil, the bumpy details of which will be in the full interview with Michéal Martin on JOE on Sunday.
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