Are you genuinely interested? If you are, i can direct you towards several books on the subject if you like. Perhaps you can dedicate your mind to the persuit of learning now that we agree you don't have a football club to follow?
I'm genuinely interested to what you feel is ill informed. I left my pursuit of learning when I left acadeamia after my PhD and have no interest in returning to study in any great detail a history of hate, religion, fighting and bitterness. If I wanted to do that I'd research the Royal Family tree.
Looking for specific reasons here. Some may have been written in jest but the thrust of it stands. 1 A country that has financially ****ed itself up in less than 100 years of existence and had to go cap in hand to others for support including the same country that it fought for independence from. 2 A superstitious people that replaced one set of fairy stories with a devout belief in another. History of sectarian violence triggered by events many hundreds of years ago. A rift in communities based on differing belief in a fairy story and different political ideals to the extent hundreds of innocents were killed in the last 30 years. The arguing and bickering continues to this day like two bald men fighting over a comb. 3 A mass exodus caused by a famine and other reasons that brought a festering sore to Scotland, another backward community. There's obviously more to Ireland (Guiness, soda bread, race horses, diddly dee music, noted authors, Andrea Corr) this but given these 3 points, why dig deeper?
If you will allow me to get to a computer to respond to those points, I will. Doing it on the phone is far from ideal. If you ate not really interested I wont bother.
[h=3]Ingredients[/h] 500g plain flour 2 tsp bicarbonate of soda 1 tsp fine sea salt Approx 400ml buttermilk or live yoghurt A little milk, if necessary [h=3]METHOD[/h][h=4]How to make classic soda bread[/h]1. Sift the flour and bicarbonate of soda into a large mixing bowl and stir in the salt. Make a well in the centre and pour in the buttermilk, stirring as you go. If necessary, add a tablespoon or two of milk to bring the mixture together; it should form a soft dough, just this side of sticky. 2. Tip it out on to a lightly floured work surface and knead lightly for about a minute, just long enough to pull it together into a loose ball but no longer - you need to get it into the oven while the bicarb is still doing its stuff. You're not looking for the kind of smooth, elastic dough you'd get with a yeast-based bread. 3. Put the round of dough on a lightly floured baking sheet and dust generously with flour. Mark a deep cross in it with a sharp, serrated knife, cutting about two-thirds of the way through the loaf. Put it in an oven preheated to 200°C/Gas Mark 6 and bake for 40-45 minutes, until the loaf sounds hollow when tapped underneath. 4. Cool on a wire rack if you like a crunchy crust, or wrap in a clean tea towel if you prefer a soft crust. Soda bread is best eaten while still warm, spread with salty butter and/or a dollop of your favourite jam. But if you have some left over the next day, it makes great toast.
While your on the subject of recipes---- Take 45000 bitter oranges, sour grapes, put in a blender and liquidate. Ahh the Rangers smoothie
Mr T you were concerned earlier about a possible reduction in TV rights money should there not be a "rangers" in the SPL. I have to say I am surprised with your concern, surely your club the big bad Rangers have stacked away enough money, so that they can pay all the other SPL clubs any shortfall in TV revenue. Con men, Murray and Whyte wouldn't be so stupid not to have some set aside for a rainy day. I know of no other gesture that these men could do in order to give the game back something of what they stole from Scottish Football.
Rangers have no money you simpleton. Where have you been for the last 6 months? As for Whyte and Murray. these individuals will hopefully be fully investigated by HMRC et al in the future and made to pay for any crimes found guilty of.
I’ll go with these one at a time. Deliberately I won’t develop all the points fully, although I will if you want to press me on any of them. The country has done a lot of sel- harming. I agree with this. The Irish can only be held solely responsible for this if you view history in a vacuum. The first leaders of the Irish Free state were not the dynamic leaders that proclaimed a Republic in 1916. Those people were executed. If they were not executed and their vision was able to be implemented then Ireland would have been a very different place. Following on from that the country was divided. To this day Unionists resist the argument towards an all Island economy. Effectively the country has been forced to operate with one hand tied behind its back. Within the Free State, the forced division of the country and the dominion status afforded the country led to a brutal civil war. This shaped the politics of the country and the two dominant parties that have been at the heart of Irish society until 2010. The civil war was caused as a direct result over a dispute over the status of the country within the British Empire. If Ireland had been “Freed” then the civil war would not have happened. The two dominant parties would not have behaved as they have ever since and the clientism indulged in by these parties would not have happened in the manner that it did. Britain exerted pressure over its dominion up to and beyond the war years. Churchill was intensely worried about the threat from the West during the war. He offered a deal to the Irish to reunite the country for assistance. Churchill could not have delivered on this deal. Ireland was forced to become insular and self sufficient because of the geographic difficulties of dealing with Europe and the pressure placed by Churchill on Ireland. His actions were not that of a friendly neighbour but of a school yard bully. This insularity shaped the direction of the country. There is more to it than that and I have been very basic, but that is certainly the root of the current financial problems. You can’t say we ****ed up the country when placed considering the context of a politically aggressive neighbour, a partitioned country and being robbed of dynamic leaders as a result of British executions as well as a political system shaped as a direct result of occupation. I entirely accept that the people in charge could and should have done better but you cannot keep tripping people up and then castigating them for falling over.
Yes, a superstitious people. As a wise man once said, it is superstitious to avoid superstition. I find it funny discussing a belief in faeries with a supporter of former football club Rangers FC. You will poke fun at people who believe in faeries, but have no qualms in accepting it when people say Rangers exist. The introduction of Christianity into Ireland ensured that the Irish became the best educated people in Europe. You mentioned the dar ages inb your previous posting, well in actual fact it was the Irish that lifted Europe out of the dark ages. The Egyptian monastic tradition as modified in Ireland was the sole reason the veil of ignorance was lifted off Europe (Except obviously Scotland). The history of Sectarian violence was of course inherited from Britain. British rule in Ireland brutally repressed Catholicism. The History you refer to from hundreds of years ago was of course a battle for the English Crown. Not the Irish one. The British introduced Penal laws that effectively tried to destroy Catholicism and to repress the natives. Those laws were British laws. Not Irish ones. When it looked as though these laws would fail to subjugate the majority (Catholic) with the advent of the United Irishmen which United Catholic, Protestant and dissenter, the British rulers came down even harder. The result was to extend privileges to the Prebyterians to maintain political power. Be under no illusion. This was an entirely political device to divide society. Its legacy is the Orange order. When the British divided Ireland the north was formed to be a Protestant State for a Protestant people. You cannot blame Irish people for dividing the country. You can blame Irish men for creating a sectarian statelet but these are the people who wish to be British, The sectarianism is based on a desire to maintain control and has **** all to do with where one prays on a Sunday. Yes, the arguing continues to this day. I would like nothing better than to not have to argue about a religio-fascist organisation seeking to exert and maintain political control. I don’t know a single Catholic with a problem with other people having a belief in consubstantiation but I know plenty of people that have no desire to be part of a political union with Britain.
There was never a famine in Ireland. Famine suggests a lack of food. This was not the case. More food was being exported from Ireland during this period than at any other time in history. I don’t know what festering sore you refer to. If you mean Celtic, then Celtic is a Scottish club born of the Irish diaspora. If you mean sectarianism, then there were more Anti-Catholic organizations in Glasgow in the 1840’s than there were Catholics and as we have already established, sectarianism was introduced to Ireland as a political tool by the British. If you want to take a look at the platation of Ulster in particular it was the Scotch who were planted here and the Scotch who put the native people off their land and the Scotch that affected a religious divide in this country. So given that those three points are inaccurate, it is worth digging deeper. You can find the oldest building in the world………..that has a roof.
No doubt someone will tell me that I missed out vast swathes of history. I know that. No doubt people will tell me I am living in the past. I am not. I am answering a question.
