Ireland... an attempted explanation...

Ireland is back in the news today and yesterday I promised you a quick history lesson on it. It’s a tricky subject to explain or understand because, as usual, the background is complicated and wrought with bias. But here are the bones of it:

Ireland has long been struggling with a mixture of Catholics and Protestants who squabble. Both religions are variations of the same sort of thing, although there are differences. The Protestants, who are more concentrated in the North, are part of the Church of England (which was started back in the Tudor times by King-Henry-of-all-the-wives) and the Catholics, who hang out more in the South, are loyal to the Pope in Rome.

England had been ruling Ireland for a long time. Once upon a time, we ruled over half the world, but as I have said before… in most cases we gave all those countries back eventually. Ireland was not one of those cases. We banned them from speaking their native language and from playing their national sport for example, as well as exploiting them over land. In the early 1900’s, they threw the towel in and there was a huge uprising in the South of Ireland against our ruling presence.

The problem was that there were lots of Protestants in the North who said they wanted to stick with Britain. Eventually, it was agreed that Ireland should be ‘partitioned’ – so that the South would gain independence and be known as ‘The Republic of Ireland,’ and the North would remain part of Great Britain.

But of course, it didn’t end there. Protestants and Catholics were still living next to one another unhappily and disagreeing over everything. As a result, a whole load of confusing groups and political parties grew out of the unrest.

‘Dissident Republicans’ is an umbrella term for all the groups that want to see Northern Ireland gain independence from Britain the way the South did. Some are peaceful but others, like the IRA, are terrorists. Incidentally, Gaddafi is known to have funded the IRA, basically on the grounds that they too are fond of bombing people.

These days, the Republic of Ireland (i.e. the South) is doing its own thing and is part of the Euro. For a while it was doing pretty well but was then hit very badly by the recent recession and ended up being bailed out by the rest of Europe.

Northern Ireland is still going through the mill. A slight majority of them say they want to stick with Britain. Sinn Fein is the name of the major political party who want them to leave Britain and join the South. Gerry Adams, who some say used to be a gun toting IRA member in his youth, runs it – and now claims to be peaceful.

A policeman was killed yesterday in the Northern Irish region of Omagh. No one has claimed responsibility (as they often do) – but it has been blamed on one of the Dissident Republican groups.

Voila.