Tag Archives: Irish nationalism

Yesterday there was a minor incident in the Black Sea when a Royal Navy destroyer HMS Defender sailed close to the Crimean shoreline and was warned by the Russian coastguard to keep away. Some shots were fired, but no one was hurt and it is likely that no one was …

My first reaction to the announcement that we would have a General Election in December was to see whether it was possible to arrange a long holiday somewhere as far away as possible. The University of Almaty looked a more inviting prospect than Aberdeen’s granite turning ever more grey in …

The great fear in the 1970s was that the Troubles would cross over at the narrowest part of the Irish sea. Scotland and Northern Ireland are so close that they almost touch, but Glasgow was never turned into Belfast. The Scottish Central Belt and especially the part around Glasgow is …

The treatment of Northern Ireland in the context of the negotiations between the EU and the UK has shown the inconsistency of the EU’s position with regard to nationalism. The EU rightly condemned Crimea’s secession from Ukraine and reunification with Russia. This was not so much because the referendum that …

There is something dispiritingly similar about Irish nationalism and Scottish nationalism. This is no doubt because the one frequently supports the other. Most Scottish nationalists would cheer if Irish nationalism achieved its goal of uniting Ireland, while I strongly suspect quite a lot of Irish people would delight in seeing …

One of the main benefits of travel and meeting people from different places is to discover that ideas that are almost universally shared in one place are unknown in another. There is a tendency in the West to suppose that what we think everyone thinks. Left/Liberal values are held to …