[esperent]

Also Irish person here. My primary school was 100m from one of the old workhouses, and I was taught from maybe age 7 what happened there. All the old stone walls in the nearby fields were built by forced famine labor. There's abandoned roads to nowhere (famine roads) all around, likewise built by forced labor.

I think it was taught quite well, and people around me while I was growing up didn't downplay it. It's still a significant event in the Irish psyche, especially in the parts of the country most deeply effected at the time.

The things it's, though, it's a fairly distant historical event at this stage, and I don't think it's healthy or helpful to the Irish collective psyche to hold on to it as strongly as we still do - not just the famine but all aspects our being "the oppressed". We're no longer oppressed, we're a privileged and filthy rich country (even if it doesn't feel like that right now, but we have no one to blame for the housing crisis except our own politicians and capitalists).

While we should be mindful of the English tendency to play down and rewrite history, I know many Irish people who are straight up racist towards the English - defended with the tired caveat the "oppressed people can't be racist towards the oppressors". Yes, they can. Maybe it's a less harmful form of racism, but it holds back the psychological development of the person with racist views nonetheless.

In secondary school "Up the Ra" was a common slogan shouted by my classmates. There's still pubs in Dublin and other places around the country where you wouldn't want to go with an English accent.

I'm not saying any of this to defend the English - they did terrible things in history, and those must not be forgotten or rewritten. There's also a fair few English people who are racist towards Irish too, not to mention a lot of "harking back to the glory days of Empire", mostly from older English men whose ancestors were probably peasants back then.

But for us Irish, holding onto this old identity of "the oppressed" is a part of our collective psyche which I struggled with a lot growing up, and it holds back out country. It's time we moved on.

Yes, I know that's hard when a quarter of the geographical landmass of Ireland still belongs to the old oppressors. But that's another thing we need to let go off. The people living in the North voted, several times, to remain in the UK. It's their choice, not ours. If they look like they're leaning to vote differently in the future we can restart the conversation.

[biorach]

> I know many Irish people who are straight up racist towards the English

I'm Irish. I've spent a lot of time in the countryside and the cities. This is not true. It's very rare to find an Irish person who is racist towards the British

> secondary school "Up the Ra" was a common slogan shouted by my classmates.

These days its justa catchy rebel chant. It does not necessarily mean the people chanting it support the IRA

> There's still pubs in Dublin and other places around the country where you wouldn't want to go with an English accent.

No there's not.

I can think of maybe 2 pubs in Dublin you might get an unfrindly welcome. On a bad day.

> But for us Irish, holding onto this old identity of "the oppressed" is a part of our collective psyche

You're really really over stating how prevalent this is

> a quarter of the geographical landmass of Ireland still belongs to the old oppressors. But that's another thing we need to let go off.

We did. Remember the referendum? The one where we collectively voted to remove the territorial claim from our constitution?

Your whole comment is vastly exaggerated.

There's Americans reading. Don't be giving them the wrong ideas, they've enough to be dealing with.

[esperent]

> It's very rare to find an Irish person who is racist towards the British

Oh come off it. No it's not. Unless you're in deep denial about what constitutes racism.

> Your whole comment is vastly exaggerated.

Maybe we have different lived experiences? We can both be Irish and have very different lives and experiences, small country though it is.

For me, nothing I said is exaggerated. Irish people do hate to state things directly though, and I'm used to be told to be quiet whenever I speak out about our issues.

> There's Americans reading. Don't be giving them the wrong ideas, they've enough to be dealing with.

Ok can't argue with that one.

[donohoe]

Another Irish person here… Going to have to agree with biorach on this one, but not by a lot.

>> It's very rare to find an Irish person who is racist towards the British >Oh come off it. No it's not. Unless you're in deep denial about what constitutes racism.

The Irish that are racist against the British are, in my experience, the American who have things to say about other groups, ethnicities, religions.

Not uncommon, not prolific, but not the crowd you’d go hang out with either.

[Fomite]

"There's Americans reading. Don't be giving them the wrong ideas, they've enough to be dealing with."

Thanks for making me laugh for a bit before I went back to staring at my screen in disbelief.

[NoboruWataya]

Sure, it's unhelpful to dwell too much on the past, but I don't think the Ireland of today is as consumed by victimhood or anti-Britishness as you are making out. I don't doubt there are pockets of society where anti-British sentiment is still strong but there is no society in the world without similar pockets of backwards, racist thinking. By and large, Irish people do not dislike or begrudge British people. While Brexit stoked some of the old tensions (again, we were far from the only country getting frustrated with Britain during those negotiations) we have, both before and since, largely regarded the British as our friends and allies.

The famine was a huge event in our history. Our population still hasn't recovered from it and the mass emigration it triggered still has an impact on our relations with other countries, particularly the US. We shouldn't be (and aren't) consumed by it but it would be madness to forget it. The same goes for our broader struggle for independence, which is literally the origin story of our country.

> Yes, I know that's hard when a quarter of the geographical landmass of Ireland still belongs to the old oppressors. But that's another thing we need to let go off. The people living in the North voted, several times, to remain in the UK. It's their choice, not ours. If they look like they're leaning to vote differently in the future we can restart the conversation.

The Irish position on the North is clear and has been since 1998. We don't lay claim to it so there is nothing to "let go". No one questions the right of the North to choose its own way, but equally we have a relationship and a history with that part of the island that we cannot just ignore.

[Spooky23]

It’s important to teach about bad times during the good times, because the horrors of what humans are capable of seem unfathomable with time and distance.

[TheCondor]

I'm American of Irish descent and have spent a lot of time in Ireland. The walls mentioned were sort of an academic trick. They had to do "work" to get "paid" and so they were made to just build walls so that they could then be paid in food and not starve.

If you hike around and see them, it's stunning. They were handmade. The rocks weren't insitu, they were carried in. It's not the pyramids, but in a relatively contemporary time they were made rather than just providing assistance.

[donall]

"Up the RA" is a great slogan. The IRA made an important and undeniable contribution to Irish statehood. I don't think we'd be "a privileged and filthy rich country" were it not for their activities in the 20th century. There is an unfortunate tendency among some people to be unwilling to recognise that for fear of offending our neighbours to the east. As you say, it's in the distant past and not worth getting too offended about.