Jim:

At least you are frank in your emotional response. I never doubted that you are in earnest, but you are like that cat Mark Twain refers to, that jumped onto a hot stove and got burned. It never jumped onto a hot stove again. Nor a cold one.

As for "little Englanders" I believe someone maybe earlier in this thread went into detail about the major shift in meaning of this term from the past century to the present. There is a somewhat clever show called, and I'm only going by memory here, "An Idiot Abroad". The guy behind the show is Ricky Gervais, who gets entirely too much pleasure out of his buddy's discomfort. His buddy is the 'Little Englander'. How all this applies to the current version of English Irish relations is a bit beyond me. I used to live in the Boston (USA) area, which has a considerable Irish ambience and considerable English history, although we did not normally get contentious along those lines, as being America, we have many ethnic fault lines to enjoy. But I recall some really good public broadcasting shows on Irish history which went into detail about the many incidents on the rocky road to Irish Independence. There were several secret societies, then there were some open parties, along the way there were Protestants such as Charles Stewart Parnell who did their best, in his case being foiled by a scandal, and of course Michael Collins, who was shot by his fellow Irish Catholics.


As for the English, if you're making the point that they were bloody colonizers, hey, we (Yanks) were started as colonies. We had formal wars with the English more than once. Twice, I think. They are still, after all is said and done, Mom. Your mileage may vary. Sláinte chugat.