What perplexes me most about some of the English Brexiteers who belittle the “foolish and hapless Irish paddies” is their ignorance of their own imperial history.

The following bits of Irish colonial history has all but melted the minds of some Brexiteers I’ve met.

For example, we Irish sadly ran vast swaths of the empire. Almost all of India, the “jewel in the crown”, was run by Irish governors. Every province bar 1 in 1890

Shamefully some of the worst massacres, such as Amritsar, were the work of Irish governors and Irish generals

Kipling, perhaps the most jingoistic of all imperialist cheerleaders, wrote in awe of the “ferocious” colonizing Irish. He advised his English brethren in the 19th century that it was the Irish, and not the English, who were the “best vanguard of imperialism”

We were sadly equally capable of scaled up acts of barbarism across other empires. Within the French empire the second largest slave trader across its inglorious history is alleged to have been a Dubliner by the name of Tony Walsh.

The subtext is you have to be careful when generalizing to a “we” in a historical context

Geniuses, like fools, are more often equally distributed in every nation, across all of history, be that Ireland or England

“We” Irish are many things. But we are neither universally fools, nor universally geniuses

Historically we Irish were neither universally oppressed, nor universally oppressors

And the same applies most other places in the world.

Although if there was a maxim with regard to oppression and oppressors it might be this:

Throughout history poor Irish & English of every creed were mostly oppressed & rich Irish & English of every creed were mostly oppressors.

Anyway it’s a sunny day. Enjoy the weather.