"You pissed off to Ireland....."
It's none of your business where I "pissed off"to Don and if that's the best you can come up with in place of an answer to the arguments put up here, it seems your own education is sorely wasted - why the hell are any of us discussing Israel, or Syria or racial killing in Florida if we let bullying pratts like yourself draw boundaries around where we can hold an opinion on?
I was born and brought up in the UK and we moved to Ireland at retirement so that we could continue the work we did in the UK and in Ireland with traditional singers.
None of this is your business, but if you are "just about sick to death of people who don't even live in this country...." I'm more than equally sick of thugs like you trying to silence what I have to say with crass tactics rather than arguments on the facts.
You have the facts of elitism and inequality - answer then instead of trying to steamroller those facts out of the discussion.
".....but I don't see you having it much better there."
With the exeption of having a far less elite education system over here, the situation is no different from the UK - how could it be? Ireland is also governed by incompetent and corrupt nest-feathering politicians and the economy is manipulated by corporate gangsters who have bled the country dry and are still paying themselves obscene salaries and bonusus for 'all the good work they have done', just like back home. Who ever suggested the situation was any different?
"The affluent south, BTW is a left wing fiction"
Throughout the time I lived in Britain I spent half of my life in the North and half in the South - only moving to London in order to continue working - there was none back home.
I know first hand the situation in both and I still have family in the poorest part of the north coping with the effects of the divide on a daily basis.
Certainly, as far as employment is concerned the North South divide is an acknowledged fact - it always has been and that divide is widening.
Try some of the data here instead of trying to censor this discussion with inanities.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/mar/29/indices-multiple-deprivation-poverty-england   
Jim Carroll