The blog post I never published . . .

Back in 2004, we had a referendum in Ireland not totally unlike Brexit in the UK. Unlike Brexit, however, it wasn’t about our relationship with the outside world, or perhaps more correctly, it was to fix a problem with immigration that would satisfy our near (then) EU neighbours that we were not going to become a back door for “illegal” immigration.

The citizenship referendum was simple: our constitution in Ireland post Good Friday Agreement, never considering that we would be an attractive draw to the rest of the world, granted citizenship to all children born on the “island of Ireland.” This was added to the constitution to replace a previous piece of law which granted citizenship on the basis of birth location, which existed from early on in the years of the state. Adding to the constitution provided surety. This killed two birds with one stone: it permitted those born “north of the border” to Irish citizenship (regardless of identity) and kept the concept of Irishness simple and open. As the old saying about Wellington goes, if you were born in that particular stable, you could be a horse if you wanted to be. It extended a generous olive branch of citizenship to anybody north of the border who wanted it, something which incidentally, as my old friends in the Reform movement will remind you, is not offered reciprocally by the United Kingdom, despite Ireland being under its dominion for eight centuries. We sat smug years in our superior generosity for years.

Until the “Man Chen” case in 2000. Chen, a pregnant Chinese migrant, travelled to Northern Ireland to give birth, allegedly so that her child would be an Irish citizen, and then took a case to get leave to remain on the basis that her child was an EU citizen. She lost her case in the UK (she was living in Wales) and the case made its way to the European Court of Justice, who ruled in her favour. Ireland, after many years of alleged “birth tourism” ran a referendum to remove the entitlement, and the referendum passed by a majority of 79%. The situation since then is that children born in Ireland are entitled to citizenship if they’ve an Irish parent or their parents have lived here legally for 3 of the previous 4 years (asylum seeking or study is not regarded for this purpose), which essentially prevents the assumed “birth tourism” accusation.

This is what was whipped up when Brexit started rearing its ugly head. I couldn’t forget the dreadful frenzy of ethnic hate that referendum, however well intentioned, surfaced. I never realised just how much HATE existed in the country. I had lived in Cork for two years, after nearly a year in central London, and couldn’t believe just how bigoted my country had become. I worked in a very global, French owned corporation, where people came from all over the world. I lived in the poorer part of the north inner city, where a large proportion of my neighbours were from behind the iron curtain or had come from Africa seeking asylum. I did not see any harm in them, the African boys who walked down the Lower Road were delightfully friendly and it was patently clear to me that there was a classic “moral panic” in response to what was perceived as a “flood.” I did not see any flood: just noticed that a lot of migrants seemed to chose to live near others of their own nationality, probably out of a sense of security.

You see, I understood this, having drifted with my former partner into the Irish centre in Camden in 2001, when we were really on our uppers. I was in the midst of a slow-motion breakdown when I suddenly abandoned my life in Dublin for London, with a hopeless case of a former partner whose main talent in life was precisely that kind of “running away” with, as the old Pogues song goes “a fiver in my pocket, and my old dancing bag.” And sure enough, like the eponymous anti-hero of that poignant song, we were well on the way to the “old main drag.” I met a lot of miserable cases of emigrants in London that day, not to mention in general. (We even ran into an Irish guy in a pub in Old Compton Street who was allegedly deceased). There is a funny thing with disastrous Irish emigration to Britain: you don’t talk about your shame, you don’t go back. The famous (fictional) case of this is the two sisters in Brian Frield’s tear-jerking, heart rending Dancing at Lughnasa where the two sisters, feeling a bit in the way in Donegal, abscond to London only to end up on the street.

Poverty in London in 2001 was divided into 3 distinct types: the transient, the recurring and the perpetual. The further you got from the first, the more likely it was to be visible, otherwise, there was (and I think, still is) a sense of shame about admitting your impoverishment. We slept on floors, stayed in cheap hostels, I sold my car (much to my exes disputation), all to keep that critical roof over our heads. (I eventually gave up in despair in May 2002, realising that my ex simply didn’t care about that roof being physical and left my job, intending to move to Galway. I spent June in Dublin and within a week had a job in Cork, where I moved in July 2002). I was still a part time classical musician in 2001, so I had many friends in London. I phoned one or two a week or two after arriving, and then realised, as the difficulty of getting a job and somewhere stable to live became a real problem, that I didn’t want people to see just how badly things were going. The thing was, I realised that I’d just made a big mess of my life, and I didn’t want anybody I knew to see that. So I kind of doubly vanished, really. For nearly six months my parents had no idea where I was.

When I finally spoke to my tearful parents after Christmas, much to my exes opposition, who kind of had a desperate grip over me (looking back, it was a survival thing, I don’t think it was malicious) I didn’t admit that I was signing on. In the end it took a full three months to find work, three months which I couldn’t afford. I recall things like saving the last ten pounds for the electricity top up, waiting until the lights literally went out, walking about two miles to the nearest “cheap” supermarket, at one point only eating two meals a day. We were constantly behind in the rent, and the anxiety I suffered from in my younger years had already resurfaced from the strain. As usual, my ex went through a job every two weeks, squandered every penny, and most of the time made no contribution. I recall hitting rock bottom at one point of November 2001 and not getting out of bed for two days. I persevered, hunted hard for jobs, and eventually started work in early January 2002. The first job (a medical insurer) was a disaster, but literally the day I was told it wasn’t working out I had a call from a call centre which got me along just fine till I finally got a critical break working on the Point of Sales support group for Sainsburys (which led to a lot of things later on, careerwise).

Its funny, but because, after I finally decided I had to place at least the Irish sea between myself and the ex for my own safety and sanity, I more or less went straight to Cork, I lost touch with an awful lot of people in Dublin and London. I was well aware of very discounted tickets for ENO and ROH but wouldn’t go because I had friends in the young artists schemes who I was too ashamed to run into. The funny thing is, people don’t like to be patronised, even when you are very hard up. I landed into another long term relationship in Cork after a year and a half, and settled in to what I thought would be a settling down in the south west.

This is where the referendum happened. It coincidentally happened that Irish Youth Choir were having a reunion week on a week between me arriving home and starting work in Cork. I met a few people there who were ex IYC but became very close companions in Cork (and still today). Some friends were unbelievably kind to me at that period, something I won’t forget or ever take for granted. You see, Cork is a small place, and I was surprised to find out that the local LGBT scene was incredibly insular. Unlike Dublin and London, where about 25% of the clientele of the bars were migrants, and everybody just took that as the norm, in Cork there was a hushed suspicion around outsiders and I was shocked to hear quite obliquely racist comments openly expressed.

To me, this was strange. My mother’s family are from Coolock, and one wing of her family occasionally come out with racist spew, but on the whole, most of my family tend to see migration as a fact of life (after all, both sides have spread to the UK, South Africa and Australia). My parents are not educated people, but they are not ignorant. Perhaps it helped that at one point, when we lived in the Rathbeale estate in the 1970s beside a rented house, at one point we had Iraqi refugee neighbours: we played with the children, who were our age, anyway. Perhaps it helped, that in the 1990s, all of my mother’s Add to dictionary-obsessed friends did Trojan social work in welcoming the first waves of UNHCR. Perhaps it helped, that my mother’s parents brought her up without the resentment of the British so common in Ireland, to respect those of other beliefs, races and national identities as equals. This was passed on to us, and religion never made us blink an eye. We were brought on caravanning holidays to northern Ireland and learned to respect difference. As my teens progressed I grew out of the typical anti-British rebellious mind-set and started to understand the deep shame of the time in the atrocities being carried out in our nations name by those who claimed Irish nationalist identities.

But in Cork, even my partner, whose mother hailed from Doncaster and still had a Yorkshire accent, could express viciously spiteful opinions about all kinds of others, from travellers, to the British, to Africans, to the Poles who were perceived as “taking over”. Maybe my working in an office IT admin job rather than a factory has a part in it, but I never felt “displaced.” In my exes factory, however, an agency was bringing in cheap temp workers from Poland who were reputedly paid less than full time staff. A friend, who worked as a barber in Tallaght, and who at the height of the “celtic tiger” probably earned more than 10k more than I did as a Service Desk Technician, lot her lucrative Sunday shift because her employer decided to refuse overtime to her Irish staff, giving it to lower paid Poles. No prizes for guessing who got the blame. Another transgender friend who hails from Sherrif St and has had to fight very hard to survive in life, found her cleaning business floundering because of cheaply paid competition from “new Irish” workers willing to work for even less.

Much as I can see the structures of oppression going against both the Irish and non Irish workers in all of the above situations, it does not, in my view, validate a racist mind-set. It is not the exploited workers fault that they do not know the “going rate” and so undercut other workers. Having worked in IT for 16 years, a sector where jobs are largely filled by middlemen in smart recruitment agencies, and where even there, huge displacement has occurred (I finally left Cork in 2010 when my 3rd job there was “offshored” to India: both of my previous two jobs had gone the same way, in fact both companies more or less shut down operations in Cork), I am aware of the damning way in which recruitment middlemen manipulate the job market in ways that divert profit in their direction, and that recruiting abroad can be a lucrative tool. For example, it is currently the case that nobody trains database administrators: they recruit them from India. Same for developers. Students who’ve spent four years slogging it out at college are shocked to find that only unpaid internships await them, yet visas are granted for “skills shortages” because IT companies can get away with demanding experience graduates cannot obtain. It permits them to undercut wages in costly areas.

Herein lies the problem: people who don’t experience this kind of job (or more correctly quality of job) displacement don’t understand it. I get that my friend who had 20% of her annual income ripped unfairly away from her is going to be angry about competition. I understand my other friend being furious watching her business dissolve in the wake of black economy competition from cash workers. The trouble is, we had all of this 20 or 20 years ago, when workers who worked part-time or were under 21 were permitted to be treated differently to full time staff. Then we had several EU directives around temporary staff, working time and eventually agency workers which initially demanded equal rights, holiday pay, parity of pay, and eventually security of tenure for workers in precarious positions. That we enforced that was good, but what it often meant was that employers had to lay off staff they could not afford, which in the late 1990s meant lay offs. I know, because it happened to me back in 2000 when the school I worked for laid me off in the wake of increased rights for part-time staff (the whole school closed the following year before new laws demanded pay and conditions parity they couldn’t afford). It only took a couple of years before the opportunity of a large influx of eastern european workers, ignorant of job standards, arrived with hungry, greedy agencies ready to act as arms-length suppliers of workers.

I’m in two minds about the value of agency-led contracting: there is very definitely a place for traditional “temp” work for backfill positions, short staffing and cover for medium term projects companies cannot hire full time for. But it should not be a cover for wage-reduction and diminished responsibility to workers, especially more vulnerable ones. Not speaking the local language fluently should not be a reason for heaping exploitation. If the governments in the UK and Ireland could enforce the changed laws under temp and part time directives, there is no reason why they should not do the same for agency workers and migrants. Yet the flood of tales of undercutting and exploitation continue.

The point I am getting at it here, is instead of blame being pointed at the rightful cause of unfair treatment and a peculiar (but common) form of workplace discrimination at the perpetrators, it is squarely targeted at the victims. As if somehow, they were able to control circumstances. Yet anybody who goes for a job, especially in a more traditional, structured workplace, knows full well that it is difficult to negotiate in a playing field that is not level, especially if you don’t have a full grasp of the language. In almost every case, by the way, of workplace exploitation or displacement, there is some kind of “middleman” — whether an agency, a company, something. No company puts up ads in Brazil for meat paring staff in Mayo. There is some kind of informal network that at some point hits “officialdom”, as most workers “brought” to Europe come with some kind of semi-official if not fully official status: whether a sponsored work permit or a semi-legitimate place on an education course that will enable them to work part time on an educational visa (a common ploy which could have been eliminated years ago). It wouldn’t take an awful lot to investigate the relationships between employers here and agents. Yet it remains ignored.

Trade unions have a lot to answer for in their failure to represent the interests of such workers: over the last 20 years, the weakening position of workplace bargaining has been exacerbated by a sense that its not really unions job to fight for non-members, even if those members are not members because they are not allowed to be members, which automatically suggests that they need representation more than ever. Instead, the work of fighting for workers rights has been abandoned to the state, and workers themselves, left to try to enforce endlessly complex EU directives, which often take years to be implemented.

So “blame the foreigner” is the default answer of so many displaced or undercut workers, who instead of asking why employers are not properly monitored or agents investigated, are simply baying the send-them-back-home tune of the tabloid media, a group who don’t even have anything to gain from the persistent putdown of an entire class of people. One of the concerns at the time of the Citizenship referendum was the local media: there was a strong perception that general responsibility in reporting (partially due to the McKenna judgment) of national media with regard to migration issues was offset by a nastier kind of reporting on local media, with radio talk shows and small local newspaper blamed for misleading reporting. In retrospect, this seems unfair, as with a few exceptions, most media sources here did not paint up migrants unfairly, the problem was more due to irresponsible commentary from politicians, particularly from rural Fianna Fáil TDs and the occasional embarrasment to other parties, who stirred the pot to gain local support.

In Ireland, perhaps more so than Britain, we’ve struggled with our own subculture of the Travelling community, who resist the cultural norms, out of a sense of ethnic difference (whether established or not is never certain), and refuse to “settle” into non-nomadic lifestyles of post-agrarian society. Blamed for a lot of social problems in some rural areas: I was stunned at the number of north Cork friends who kept guns in rural areas out of fear of “the travellers” who unfortunately matched their refusal to conform to larger societies ways, including a propensity for making uninvited visits to settled peoples properties. While this is understandable in a culture that has rejected the property ownership norms of western society (remember its an accepted societal norm, not a “natural law”), it is quite disturbing for a person living alone to find a strange young man in their garage poking around their power tools, which happened to a friends brother a few years back. Its not hugely different to the perennial problem of idiot dog-owners who allow dogs to roam off the leash in farming regions, “worrying” sheep, which causes severe damage to farmers (another source of gun-ownership I noticed in Cork).

This was very different in the quasi-urban, semi-rural area in which I grew up. In an urban housing estate of 1st and 2nd generation owner occupied housing, the travelling community represented a kind of magic to children whose parents grew up in the tenement slums of the city up to the 60s, if we hadn’t the antipathy of our country relatives. In fairness, many of the “blow-ins” around here are “country”, but the large number of native “Dubs” brings a slightly less antagonistic attitude to travellers, whom in my childhood, we knew as “gipsies” or perhaps “tinkers.” However, their “difference” finally came to light when a bunch of them were “settled” nearby and put into our school, to be targeted for fights by enterprising Brackenstown boys. It didn’t quite make sense to me why the traveller boys were targeted in this way, but it did highlight their “outsiderness”, although in a school split almost evenly between working class council estates and middle class aspiring owner occupiers, everybody was kind of a bit “different” anyway. Of course, they were catholic, which kind of meant at least the parish would speak up for them, well you’d expect so, anyway. They certainly seemed to in late 1970s/early 1980s Swords.

The thing was, a person of colour in 1980s Swords was quite a novelty. It was only when an old local friend mentioned occasional discrimination “because I’m black” that I realised “god yeah, so-and-so is actually black”. We were colour blind to the exceptions. Later on, in the 1990s, we found the black bass who joined the IYC from Cork city deeply amusing on account of his overwhelming “norrie” accent (i.e. north Cork inner city), but only because he was an exception at that time (ironically, today the area is home to a very large community of African background, so Frank is no longer special). A friend, half Nigerian, who grew up in the Liberties slightly earlier, admits to being rather bemused because newcoming African migrants are very different to her father’s generation: “I went to an ethnic hairdresser, and they went off and left me sitting there: turns out African women go to the hairdresser to socialise, not get their hair done!” she laughed.

Perhaps the influx of Bosians changed our attitude completely in the 1990s. The local women helped in any way they could, offering small jobs to help them earn a living (we were very surprised to learn that Yugoslavia had allowed a small degree of private enterprise, so one of the lads was a good mechanic, having had his own business back home), helping learn the language, and providing social outlets. One day my Mum went to a dinner, where she came back amused that “they served dinner backwards: they started with coffee, then desert and so on.” But the stories were harrowing (I was to hear much worse later on when I got to know others who’d fleed Bosnia): for example one family whose small child had nightmares every night, because he thought the dead souls of the bodies they had to run over to escape would come back to get him later on.

One day, in 2004, I literally exploded into a rage after one of my then partners racist friends used the term “fucking foreigners.” I was sick of it: the newspaper reports of bigotry, the loathsome racists who were putting themselves up in local elections, the whining about the bright young Poles who served you politely in shops instead of scowling relatives of the owner who saw it beneath them, the grumpy sarcastic comments about Polish workers on the job. The girl in question was herself a gay woman, whose partner came from an abusive background. It made me angry that people who knew discrimination and intolerance themselves could replicate that intolerance towards others. Some of my friends truly couldn’t “get” why I could even ASSOCIATE with people like that. This was long before the days of social media, and de-friending/blocking or muting out people with whom you disagreed. I like to remind folk who bemoan the good old days before we created online echo chambers that they existed long before that (and frankly, nobody is better at creating on- and offline echo chambers than those who don’t want to hear any more bigotry). I just got on with it. (The relationship eventually collapsed, ironically due to my pushing my ex to be less bigoted about a northern uncle and niece we met in the Canaries in 2007. The ex and the niece went into the sunset together, and I moved back into Cork city after 3 years in rural Cork).

Thing was, the referendum in 2004 made things much, much worse. It implicitly validated the perception that human nature would be at its worst. Lets be honest here, if you’re going to have a baby in the next two weeks, how likely are you to take off to somewhere in Ireland strategically to get citizenship for the child? Almost every woman I know who is expecting does everything she can to ease passage into the world for herself and the expected child, not take off to an unknown country to randomly sample their mediocre healthcare. People looked around, and instead of understanding that a lot of young, fertile people were stuck waiting for asylum decisions with nothing much to do but mingle, mate and get on with the act of living, accused them of deliberately having children to exploit loopholes. I don’t think we can even start to understate the tacit misogyny of this attitude, where women are accused of deliberately impregnating themselves in order to get leave to remain, or young black men simply became sexual predators.

Strangely, on that difficult night in 2004, when I lost my rag, had all three friends turn on me and accuse me of being “rude”, when I managed to get them drunk enough, one did admit she was afraid of black men. I think that is understated in narratives of black/white relations: black bodies are more heavily sexualised than white bodies, women as objects and men as predators ready to prey on “innocent” white women. The concept extends sometimes to Asian and Middle Eastern men (unfortunately not helped by tropes of dark ages slavery and a culture of women as chattels in some interpretations of Islamic law). This extends into cultural fears of black and Asian men. This is exacerbated by some veiling traditions which suggest that women “improperly dressed” are sexually available. Many progressive political movements have an abysmal history of tackling such attitudes (with a few notable exceptions, such as the brilliant Maryam Namazie, who simply doesn’t let Islam away with its failure to treat women or apostates fairly).

The failure also, to tackle so-called “radicalisation” within second generation migrant families has contributed to a fear of migrants from countries of Islamic traditions in particular, though migration in general has obtained a bad reputation. Of course, Britain has a history of colonising, not being the colonised, and the ironic reversal of its own invasions and takeovers of other peoples countries are forgotten when the descendants of the colonies once supressed and ravaged come looking to their former colonial master for a new home. It is of no small coincidence that a huge percentage of the migrant population, from Ireland to the new world, to Asia and Africa, contain a huge number of citizens of countries Britain ruled forcibly for centuries. Even now, a considerable proportion of asylum seekers come from states invaded by Britain (Iraq and Afghanistan). Yet nobody sees much irony in this, and a shocking number of asylum cases were rejected right at the time when Britain saw fit to invade those countries alongside the US.

Yet the “radicalisation” fear ignores a counter-radicalisation which goes ignored: a number of white English have gone to destabilised countries, sometimes illegally, sometimes via legitimate or quasi legitimate efforts, to fight on the side of whatever “good guy” the western media current endorses. These are rarely noticed, let alone jailed and persecuted. This is just another way in which anti migrant trends are left to fester.

There has been a particularly large body of criticism aimed at the UK Labour party for its failure to address the concerns of presumed “labour” communities in the north of England. Jeremy Corbyn fully deserves a share of the blame for his lukewarm performance during the campaign, but it is more symptomatic of his dismal leadership and inability to spark passion amongst more than a small group of (it seems) ultra-leftist zealots than anything else. Corbyn, unfortunately, has turned out to be a poor choice for Labour at a time when it needs unity and strong leadership: the Delete repeated word anti-Semitism already creeping through the party unchallenged may be a sign of conceding defeat to anti-emigrant sentiment than to take part in a desperately needed collective effort across all political divides to end the pernicious spread of racism throughout Britain, before it is too late.

As the UKIP effectively implodes in the wake of achieving its goal of tearing Britain out of Europe and establishing racist diatribe as acceptable in public life, the Labour party is barely capable of getting beyond its own petty leadership squabble, in particular the horrible castigation of anybody angry about the mess Corbyn has mess of the party as part of a “Blairite coup”, as if backing one of the strongest periods Labour had in power in the history of modern democracy was in fact a mask for lite-Toryism. This is, frankly, a pernicious lie not dissimilar to the repetitive untruths of the “Leave” campaign: Labour under Blair did not reinforce conservative standards, it did, however, take the easier option of creating shadow welfare states (through tax credits) instead of encouraging economic rejuvenation. But wait a minute, this was LABOUR in government. They are not exactly a party associated with entrepreneurship. So of course, instead of backing local businesses and trying to force people off welfare into work, they took a “soft” approach and enticed would-be workers with top-ups through other means. Remember that Labour does not have a strong hand with big business, some of whom are not only enormous but wield huge power over the UK economy and in particular, precarious local economies.

A week before the vote, end route to a conference, I sat on a bus going into Milton Keynes, looking at the huge distribution centres which feed megacap supply chains around Britain. John Lewis. New Look. Argos. Waitrose. I wondered what Brexit would mean for those businesses, and the people who work for them. One or two had signs up looking for staff, so things couldn’t be that bad. I thought to myself that surely people in that area would understand the dependence of their jobs on EU trade, so I was surprised when a week later that region returned a clear “leave” vote. Only one person at the conference spoke openly of her desire to vote leave, citing “we need to give more to charity”, before noting that she’d lived in Spain for a while (as if that somehow added to her knowledge and understanding of the issue). In general, however, people didn’t express a view and I was left wondering, especially now, if a lot of people who voted leave just kept quiet about it, in light of its association with jingoist nationalist movements such as UKIP, and its deeply lack of political correctness.

Two years ago, on a first time visiting Bayreuth for the Richard Wagner festival there, we wandered into an exhibition on Wagner and Judaism (one of, in fact, two exhibitions that weekend). I read sufficient German to have become quite despondent halfway through the exhibition when it appeared to be the same story over and over: young singer at some point sings Wagner, perhaps comes to Bayreuth, Cosima or later, Hitler makes disparaging remarks, next thing you know, singer has migrated to the United States. A remarkably large number of singers of Jewish origin have been associated with Wagner or his works, so it was an incredibly rich exhibition: but the scale of it was what shocked me. Literally dozens of performers in a very narrow field, were driven out because of sectarian prejudice gone mad.

This, now, is the deep fear for not just Britain, but the entire west. It is not just a European problem. In the US, the loathsome Donald Trump continues to bleat a message of intolerance and hate towards Muslims, to the applause of the Republican right, without any shame whatsoever. Those who criticise Israel for its sucking up illegally of land outside itself rightful ownership ignore that nearly three quarters of a million Jews have made “Aliyah” from the USSR and former Soviet outposts. From 1970 to 1988, 165,000 left for Israel, this number increasing even more in the wake of a supposedly “freer” Russia: in the following years, the number accelerated, and by 2006 nearly a million more Jews had travelled permanently to make their home in Israel (much to the annoyance of Americans and Arabs alike). This has created severe housing shortages in Israel, which has led to a problem of settlements in disputed areas. Much of this is not understood by left progressives who see this as deliberate invasion rather than a failure to plan for sustainable migration and legal communities in politically unstable regions with porous borders. Blaming Israel is like blaming the Republic of Ireland for the existence of the IRA: a combination of powerful forces creates many of the problems which Israel faces, and the anti-Semitism which masks itself behind movements of “solidarity” with a vile political movements such as Hamas is unhelpful, especially for the Israeli left who struggle to fight a swing to the right in the wake of ignorant political activism from those who don’t understand the nuances of the Israeli migration problem.

Finally, the real problem now, not just for Britain, but for every western country is: how do you turn back the tide of sectarian and ethnic hate? In a way, I’m not totally surprised that a country whose democratic politics for nearly 400 years has formulated around sectarianism and colonising has shifted in post-religious and postcolonial times to ethnic elitism. Its no surprise that countries like France (with a similar problem of decolonisation and migratory kickback from old colonies) has also made a mess of handling conservative resistance to newcomers.

Similarly, I am reminded, in this centenary of Ireland’s grassroots revolution for political independence, that if anybody mentioned that we have back economically “worse off” since leaving the UK in the 1920s, you’d be laughed at. We would regard putting economics before national pride and identity as an insult, yet we expected it from the English and Welsh. For the Scots, it is a different matter: they DO see “European-ness” as part of their identity in a way those further south cannot, and since they previously were able to cast a mature decision to decide, partly on the promise of “togetherness” that now seems hollow given the Anglo-welsh rejection, to remain, at least for now, in the UK. The question now is, if the European federal project is not good enough for the Anglo-welsh, why is the local quasi-federation justified? I suspect for the Scottish it will mark a considerable loss in trust and lead to a push to further nationalism. I hope Scotland does so without the scourge of sectarian hate which has characterised Irish (and it now seems, Anglo-welsh) nationalism.

For Ireland it is a different matter: we are better able to understand the nuances of ethnocentric hate from our own history of being treated as inferior to our colonial oppressor, culminating in the starvation of millions in our 19th century potato famine. But for that colonial oppressor, it has a soul searching to do, a task which could learn a lot from efforts such as the popular US media organisation On Being, with its connections into civil society projects which aim to heal the societal wounds caused by racism in public life. A country which divides itself on the basic of religion and ethnicity is not heading down a healthy route for the future. Already much damage has been done (arguably, I would say, a loss of trust would have happened even has remain won the vote), and it is critical that civil society in Britain and elsewhere takes a long hard look at what has brought us to this juncture, and how we can escape its clutches. If we don’t, we can only look to the US, and the horrible spate of shootings of minorities that is increasing, alongside worse violence, to see where this will head.