English people who support a UI?

[SevenStars]

Great song by an English man.

"Repaterate to England all you who call it home,
Leave Ireland for the Irish
Not for London or for Rome"

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLZhNs7M1oE"]YouTube - John & Yoko - Sunday Bloody Sunday[/ame]

[the impossibilist]

They don't at all, in general. They know very little beyond U2 come from there and they think the Catholics and the Protestants were fighting some sort of religious war (which isn't entirely wrong on the part of some of the Prods...). Even most of the Irish-descent I grew up with didn't have the first clue about the place. Even among them I was part of a small minority who could actually point to Ireland on a map...

I think you might be going back a bit further than me, apologies if not. But I think awareness/fondness was a lot wider amongst the younger people by the mid-Nineties, and far from all of them that I knew had any Irish blood.

I remember the HMV in Oxford packed out one daytime for the Saw Doctors live. The Cranberries were huge too. But that's students for you This was around the time Roy Foster was made Carroll professor, and Heaney was around a fair bit.

I couldn't go to the kebab van without some posh totty hearing my accent and asking me to say something in Gaelic for her... marvellous.

[Thranduil]

Great song by an English man.

"Repaterate to England all you who call it home,
Leave Ireland for the Irish
Not for London or for Rome"

YouTube - John & Yoko - Sunday Bloody Sunday

Thanks for that, never heard it before... very surprising... the lyrics are hardcore, no punches pulled.

You anglo pigs and scotties
Sent to colonize the north
You wave your bloody union jack
And you know what its worth!
How dare you hold to ransom
A people proud and free

If The Edge had come before Bono with lyrics like that i think he would have dropped dead on the spot. Agh from the measure of the man and his habit of refusing to keep inside his strong views on serious issues.... no wonder someone killed him.

[SevenStars]

Thanks for that, never heard it before... very surprising... the lyrics are hardcore, no punches pulled.

.

That whole album is really brillant. Hard to find now but really worth looking for.

[toxic avenger]

I think you might be going back a bit further than me, apologies if not. But I think awareness/fondness was a lot wider amongst the younger people by the mid-Nineties, and far from all of them that I knew had any Irish blood.

I remember the HMV in Oxford packed out one daytime for the Saw Doctors live. The Cranberries were huge too. But that's students for you This was around the time Roy Foster was made Carroll professor, and Heaney was around a fair bit.

I couldn't go to the kebab van without some posh totty hearing my accent and asking me to say something in Gaelic for her... marvellous.

I remember the day Bobby Sands died, I'm pretty sure I am the only one of those I grew up with who does (possibly only a few know who he was). There were a few of us who were very pro-Republican (everything was kind of polarised in those days) and knew a lot of what was going on, but the vast majority of even the Irish descent knew little and didn't care. Possibly my family having a Republican background indoctrinated me - I'm pretty sure there was no-one else in my school whose favourite song growing up in the early 80s was The Men Behind The Wire...

[SevenStars]

I remember the HMV in Oxford packed out one daytime for the Saw Doctors live. The Cranberries were huge too. But that's students for you This was around the time Roy Foster was made Carroll professor, and Heaney was around a fair bit.

I couldn't go to the kebab van without some posh totty hearing my accent and asking me to say something in Gaelic for her... marvellous.

A comrade of mine told me about his time in University in Wales, about the contempt the English students and the for want of a better word "west brits" had towards ordinary working class welsh people...but hey thats the reality of occupation. The way the middle class sexually objectify each other is also pretty sickening.

While the Saw Doctors were playing in Oxford (a city very divided by class that has seen more than a few riots) plastic bullets were probably being fired at working class kids in Derry and Belfast, and working class kids were probably getting the sh2t kicked out of them in prison cells over there aswell.

[the impossibilist]

A comrade of mine told me about his time in University in Wales, about the contempt the English students and the for want of a better word "west brits" had towards ordinary working class welsh people...but hey thats the reality of occupation. The way the middle class sexually objectify each other is also pretty sickening.

While the Saw Doctors were playing in Oxford (a city very divided by class that has seen more than a few riots) plastic bullets were probably being fired at working class kids in Derry and Belfast, and working class kids were probably getting the sh2t kicked out of them in prison cells over there aswell.

I'd bet a fair amount of money that your ''comrade'' was talking out of his hole. To a captivated audience of course.

That hostility is far more likely to have come from the opposite direction. If anything, that is the reality of that particular occupation. And that is my first-hand experience, having spent many, many weekends with a couple of friends, and one of my brothers, who all studied at Cardiff Uni.

Since you insist on seeing things in class terms, you should therefore reconsider your certain insouciance towards the working-class kids who, having no viable career choices in the sink estates of Darlington or Sheffield etc, choose the British Army.

Where is your class-consciousness in that context, brother ?

Oxford (a city very divided by class that has seen more than a few riots)

Listen, I lived in that city for four years. I lived in the middle of Blackbird Leys, and worked in there on the sites to pay my own way through college, and I did a small bit of community work (adult literacy). So spare us your second-hand ''analysis'', because I already know as much about those places as you'll ever know.

As for your hilarious observation - The way the middle class sexually objectify each other is also pretty sickening. Wow, what an inexperienced little jerk you must be. You'll learn.

Since you're so fond of John Lennon, and your treasured working-class status...

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njG7p6CSbCU"]YouTube - Working Class Hero - John Lennon[/ame]

Get a life man, and stop boring people with your unoriginal analysis and vicarious struggles.

[Pauli]

Most English people I met would be happy to be shot of the place. They don't see the point in remaining there and have no affinity with it. The only time I encountered any evidence of otherwise rational people possessed of lazy stereotypes was at a country house dinner party held somewhere near Aylesbury to which I had been, for some reason, invited by a friend. This was a horsey set affair and the lady organising it indulged what passed for a sense of humour by seating me to the left of a lady in her late fifties who was a minor aristocrat of some sort. For the first half hour, this minor aristocrat completely ignored me while I had a pleasant conversation with the lady on my left.

Then she turned to me and said that she couldn't quite place the accent. I told her I was from Dublin and she replied

" Ah, yes, Ireland, isn't it`"

"Yes it is"; I replied.

"Are you here long, in England, I mean?", she asked

"Almost a year"

"Do you like it?", she asked, already finding the conversation as tedious as I did.

"It's okay", I said.

"What do you think of British culture?" she asked.

I replied "I think it is an excellent idea and if I can help in any way, please let me know"

She thought for a minute and, to her credit, started conversing on a more even level. When it came to whether I thought there would ever be a united Ireland, I said that eventually there would be because the English don't want it, it is not in their interest to have it and they can't afford it. It turned out that she believed exactly the same thing.

Strange people, the English.

[SevenStars]

As for your hilarious observation - The way the middle class sexually objectify each other is also pretty sickening. Wow, what an inexperienced little jerk you must be. You'll learn.

Since you're so fond of John Lennon, and your treasured working-class status...

.

And your point by posting that video is?

This is what John Lennon had to say about the objectization of women under Capitalism.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eE2zMENLU8"]YouTube - John lennon - Woman is the ************************************ of the world[/ame]

A fitting tribute to Irish working class women who have more than played their part in the fight for freedom.

[nomedia="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ELdWiYopuw"]YouTube - Mairead Farrell[/nomedia]

[the impossibilist]

Most English people I met would be happy to be shot of the place. They don't see the point in remaining there and have no affinity with it. The only time I encountered any evidence of otherwise rational people possessed of lazy stereotypes was at a country house dinner party held somewhere near Aylesbury to which I had been, for some reason, invited by a friend. This was a horsey set affair and the lady organising it indulged what passed for a sense of humour by seating me to the left of a lady in her late fifties who was a minor aristocrat of some sort. For the first half hour, this minor aristocrat completely ignored me while I had a pleasant conversation with the lady on my left.

Then she turned to me and said that she couldn't quite place the accent. I told her I was from Dublin and she replied

" Ah, yes, Ireland, isn't it`"

"Yes it is"; I replied.

"Are you here long, in England, I mean?", she asked

"Almost a year"

"Do you like it?", she asked, already finding the conversation as tedious as I did.

"It's okay", I said.

"What do you think of British culture?" she asked.

I replied "I think it is an excellent idea and if I can help in any way, please let me know"

She thought for a minute and, to her credit, started conversing on a more even level. When it came to whether I thought there would ever be a united Ireland, I said that eventually there would be because the English don't want it, it is not in their interest to have it and they can't afford it. It turned out that she believed exactly the same thing.

Strange people, the English.

They are indeed. But I like them in many, many ways.

Nuala O'Faoláin's memoir title arises from a similar incident, iirc. At a dinner, and the old toff next to her said ''Are You Somebody ?'' (in the sense of being connected to old money, or whatever) Hilarious.