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Archiver > GENIRE > 1999-05 > 0927772540


From: "P A MagLOCHLAINN" <>
Subject: Re: Immigration to England from Ireland
Date: Thu, 27 May 1999 03:35:40 +0100


Please, folks, can we discuss this calmly and charitably - and accurately?
Like most people here in Northern Ireland, I have lost friends and loved
ones because of the Troubles. But the way forward is to listen to one
another, not shout angrily.
To say that England is "in Ireland" is to ignore the fact that one million
people in Northern Ireland feel that their first loyalty is to their British
heritage - as Jim Molyneaux said: "WE'RE the Brits - and we're NOT getting
out!"
These same people would feel their second identity is Irish - but because so
many people insist that there is only ONE way of being Irish (and that is to
be part of the Irish CATHOLIC nation), most of the one million Protestants
in Northern Ireland are forced to deny the Irish part of their heritage.
Because to accept it, means to appear to accept the fascist, extreme Irish
nationalism of Sinn Fein, of the IRA and Noraid, and of those people in
Irish America whose picture of Ireland is closer to Finian's Rainbow than to
Roddy Doyle.
Please, my American Irish cousins, please come to Ireland and see for
yourselves the many and real problems MODERN pluralist (ie NO LONGER
exclusively Catholic) Ireland has - with 90% unemployment in parts of
Dublin, for example, and dire poverty at many different levels. We have a
frightening hard drugs problem in Dublin, which is still a more dangerous
city than Belfast - there's something I bet most Irish-Americans will find
it hard to believe!
We have a wildly spiralling rate of suicide among our young people, and a
Catholic Church which is punch-drunk from a continuous series of child sex
abuse scandals. And yet the Republic has one of the most vibrant economies
in western Europe!
Please up-date your image of Ireland: YOU would be rightly annoyed if MY
mental image of the United States was one hundred years old.
Like many, many Irish people, I just want to live in peace with my
neighbours, both Protestant and Catholic - in fact, I have cousins of BOTH
religions, and would not want to lose ANY of them. It is not the ISLAND
that is divided, it is the Irish PEOPLE - and we can only unite people if we
genuinely respect one another's different points of view, and listen to and
value these.
Please help us to persuade the extreme Irish nationalists and the extreme
British nationalists of Northern Ireland to accept one another's right to
exist, and to let the rest of us all get on with our beloved family history!
P A MagLOCHLAINN, Belfast ()
======
Trish wrote in message <7i4cj0$f5t$1@scotty.tinet.ie>...
>
><> wrote in message
>news:...
><snip>
>In the near millenium Catholic nationalists will be a
>> majority and then the problem will be solved forever , England , get out
>> of Ireland .
>>
>
>Ladybird guide to Ireland - page one.
>It's this sort of ill-informed nonsense that allowed groups such as Noraid
>to fund the killing of Irish people in the last 30 years.
=======

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