"In Europe, only Britain, Sweden and Finland are free of Colorado beetle colonies," reported the Times this week, in all good faith. We might gently tap the journalist who wrote that story on the shoulder and ask: "What about Ireland?" She no doubt would tut in agreement, and say, "Yes, of course, and Ireland too."
And Ireland too. It comes down to this so often among the British that there is no longer any point in complaining about it; but Irish people will complain about it, because it is as much an Irish characteristic to complain about the British as it is for the British to be so steadfastly and unwaveringly ignorant about Irish matters. This ignorance reveals itself constantly in almost any transaction with British companies, British banks, British mail-order firms; and we must presume now, after 30 years in which Ireland invariably dominated the British news like no other single item, that this is the British way - or perhaps we should say "English", because the Welsh and the Scots are certainly not as incorrigibly ineducable about Irish matters.
Telephone codes
An Irish person giving his phone number to an Englishman will prefix it with the access codes from Britain. An Englishman will almost certainly assume that the Irish phone system is miraculously part of the British system and give you his number without the international prefix. English people seem to be utterly unaware that Ireland has a separate currency from Britain, as they are that our postal system is different. Mail order offers "applicable to UK only" are usually honoured if you put an Irish address on the application form.
And who has not been asked whether Dublin is in Northern Ireland? How often have Bord Failte officials had to explain to English enquirers that the Falls Road is nowhere near Cork, and no, Crossmaglen is not just outside Limerick? For even now, with thousands of millions of pounds of English taxpayers' money having been spent on Northern Ireland, and hundreds of English lives lost in the North and in towns and cities the length of England over the past 30 years, the English remain unassailably ignorant of Irish matters.
This cannot be due to some heroic effort of intellectual will: it can only be due to some freakish quirk of identity. Not knowing about Ireland, the only country with which the United Kingdom has ever had a land border, is, it seems, as quintessentially part of being English as tea or cricket; and equally, a powerful though subconscious determination to be offended by the English seems to be a vital part of the Irish psyche.
IRA atrocity
The day after a particularly vile IRA atrocity in London - the massacre of army bandsmen and a troop of cavalry - there was uproar in Ireland, not over the evils of the IRA, but over the headline in the Daily Mirror. "BASTARDS" it said. This was adjudged to be a reference to all Irish people, though nowhere in the newspaper was any reference made to anyone other than the IRA, for whom, I should have thought after such a deed, the term "bastards" was moderation itself.
A comparable desire to seek out and revel in English oppression came on the News at One Thirty (as it then was) the day after the massacre of the Mountbatten boating party and the slaughter of 17 soldiers near Warrenpoint. In the aftermath of the latter, panicking soldiers had shot dead a tourist (who happened to be English) across the Narrow Water. It was this death, not the 17 which had immediately preceded it, nor the butchery of children and octogenarians on a boating holiday, which the RTE news team self-righteously focused on. . .And now to that controversial shooting by British soldiers yesterday of a tourist in Co Louth. . .
This is a weird dialectic between two peoples who have been interacting for one-and-a-half millennia: on the one hand, an invincible ignorance of almost pathological proportions, and on the other, a querulous desire to be insulted. This is accentuated by the relatively large amount of knowledge that Irish people have of England, which makes that vast continent of English ignorance about Ireland seem like a calculated slight. But it is not; it is what it is, a simple ignorance which remains rock solid and immovable.
These qualities dividing the two primary English-speaking countries of Europe are so enduring that one must presume that they are packaged deep within each's sense of identity. The English do not consciously choose to be ignorant of the Irish, but that is what they tiresomely are; the Irish do not deliberately relish victimhood, though the nourishment of grievance is an evident and equally tiresome national characteristic.
Benchmark identity
What makes this contrast so unbearable for so many Irish people is that the benchmark identity against which Irishness is often defined in their own minds is English. But naturally, the English are blissfully unaware of this, as they are equally unaware of comparable definitions being stridently made by the Welsh and the Scots.
Ireland is vital for the British. Huge sections of their economy depend on exports to Ireland; yet almost any article or programme about Britain's trading needs will exclude this country, rather as television weather maps suggest that Ireland is uniquely blessed by having no weather at all. Irish paranoia tends to interpret this as antiIrishness. It's not. It's Hibernocaecitas, Irelandblindness, which is simply part of being English - is, was and ever more shall be so.