It’s really noticeable how any discussion about Ireland and the British Empire - and especially how it’s lack of honest discussion continues to impact on us today - drags out the flag-bearing, anonymous troll accounts.

A couple of notables from Prof Ahlmeyer’s article today:

(1) The assumption that oppressed people suffered oppression as a totalizing condition with no variation across time and space (2) that oppressed people had no agency or circumvention of oppression 3) that oppressed people could not be involved in the oppression of others.

There are notable connections to far right rhetoric (1) that there are hierarchies of Irishness (2) and that Irishness excludes particular groups eg Protestants, migrant backgrounds, anyone of colour. The number of times Prof Ohlmeyer’s place of birth was mentioned

These flag-bearing troll accounts are the same ones crying about 800 years of oppression, discrimination by ‘the English’ and demands for Irish unity but they can square all that with claims that all Irish connections to Empire were thru Protestants (who aren’t really Irish)

PS - The idea that Catholicism = Irishness is sectarian bile and it doesn’t even deal with the question of Irish complicity in the British Empire as Catholics were involved throughout it too.