Do British people know that the Irish people living in Boston support a United Ireland completely free of British rule? (Quora)

I should not be surprised to find a few Irish people living in Boston, Lincolnshire, since there are Irish people living happily all over the UK. So long as their opinions do not involve harming other people, what they think about the desirability of a united Ireland is their own business. Like everyone else in the UK, they are free to choose any peaceful political point of view.

The same applies to Irish people living in Ireland. If and when the people of Northern Ireland and the people of the Irish Republic both desire a united Ireland, and each group expresses that desire in a referendum, then a united Ireland will come about. This has been guaranteed in law.

Northern Ireland is no more under British rule than Yorkshire is under British rule. Neither are colonies. Both are part of the UK, and both elect representatives directly to the UK parliament on the same basis as anywhere else in the country. The UK government is made up of members of parliament.

I should be quite surprised to find there are more than a few Irish people living in Boston, USA. By US law, people born in the USA are US citizens. The person currently occupying the White House erroneously believes himself to be Irish. If he were Irish, he could not be President of the United States. Being descended from nineteenth century Irish immigrants does not make you Irish, any more than being descended from Vikings makes me Danish.

The opinions of US citizens on what should happen in either part of Ireland are of no great importance, since they are not Irish voters. The people who live in Ireland are the voices that matter.

Quite often, the way US views are expressed suggest they still view Irish affairs through the prism of nineteenth century politics handed down from immigrants. History did not stop when their ancestors left Ireland. The problems they may think they are helping to solve were actually solved years ago, and no sane person wishes to be dragged back to the bad old days. Ireland has moved on, and they should move on with it.

I am quite sure that if US citizens wanted to come and live, work and invest in Ireland, the people there would make them welcome. Failing that desire, however, they should not seek to impose their views on those who do live there.

Why do so many people (on Quora) get offended when Americans want to identify with the countries of their ancestors when it was not their own choice that their ancestors left their home country?

The Capitol, Washington D.C.

Identification by Americans with countries of ancestral origin can be a perfectly harmless eccentricity or it can be a menace.

I don’t see any problem with an American of Italian descent calling himself an Italian-American, running an Italian restaurant or singing Verdi for fun.

The problem arises when he not only calls himself an Italian but thinks this entitles him to some sort of status in respect of modern Italian social, cultural or particularly political questions. If he has any knowledge of Italy at all it is most likely to be a traditional family perspective or a romantic myth that may never have reflected reality, let alone have relevance to Italian reality today.

He may even go so far as to preserve inherited hostile attitudes towards those held responsible for pressuring his ancestors to emigrate, and apply these attitudes towards these people’s descendants even though the descendants bear no guilt for their ancestors’ behaviour and may never had any issues with the descendants of the long-ago emigrant’s neighbours who did not emigrate. You can’t sort out today problems that used to exist centuries ago, but you sure can create new ones.

For example, when we speak of expatriate Scots being ‘more Scottish than the the Scots’, we mean their perspective involves looking back through very rose-tinted spectacles at a largely fictional past. Yet they sometimes seem to think think this gives them a right to pontificate upon the present. If they are influential, they can make big waves in ‘the old country’ despite their ignorance of its current state.

So when, for example, a ‘Scottish’ POTUS is followed by an ‘Irish’ POTUS, it naturally worries those who have to live in or alongside the country claimed by these powerful, but misinformed, people. How great is the danger that, in seeking to confirm the support of some similarly misguided American voters’ lobby, a president may turn his inherited prejudice into current international policy?

If matters should reach that stage, being offended is going to be the least of our problems.

US Election Hysteria

Everyone please take a deep breath, sit down and count to ten.

In the great scheme of things, the success of a protest candidate in a reasonably democratic election should not rank very high on the scariness scale.

It has been my feeling for a long time that democracy was decaying into a shell of itself with the rapid growth of a class of professional politicians that had little or no idea of the problems confronting the folk they allegedly represented.

Brexit came as a shock to this class when if they had being doing their job properly it might not even have happened, let alone come as a bolt from the blue.

The Beltway politicians in the US are similar in this respect to the London-centric UK political elite, a similar class in France, Germany, Holland etc. In Scotland the SNP are riding a wave of inchoate (and innumerate) populist revolt against the system.

It's forty years since Lord Hailsham drew attention to what he called 'Elective Dictatorship'. The re-energising of the whole process is overdue and sadly the professional political classes would not listen any other way.

Of course it remains to be seen if they will listen this way. 

In the words of the old Chinese curse, we live in interesting times.