good luck with that, but when i hung around anglo folk groups i heard irish jokes and in western canada slanders about eastern canadians every day. when i was recently in england i went to a folk group where some one sang "a parcel of rougues in as nation". i said privately to one person, well i love to hear lowlandres sing about their selling out their nation with no apparant awareness that their co countrymen in the highlands were beinf decimated by famine and land loss. he siad i better not talk about that here.

i didn't push it but it looked to me like you can't talk about the ethnic cleansing done by the british empire.

on the bright side among other songs i sang lukey's boat and a few people knew the words to this newfoundland song.

and of course in the discussions about the murder of innocent irish protestors by the hard core racists of the british army at bloody sunday, and the subsequent cover up and criminalization and slander of the worst criminal sort, few acknowledge the criminal and racist behavior, and no one seems to be charging the murders with murder.

so civility? yeah the progressives used to try. few do now.

if you want a civil scoiety you have to acknowledge the evils of the past and not play pretend that they will go away. they never go away as long as the play pretend game is allowed to be used by racists to hide behind. few in the gaelic world, or the north american native world for that matter are vindicvtive, nor seeking any revenge. howeever simple open acknowledgemnent of the evils of the past and the refusal to allow continued cover ups, goes a long way to establishing civil society. without it there will never be one.

i do have to give david cameron some credit for acknowledging the wrong of the bloody sunday cover up and for acknowledging while in pakistan that many of the world's ethnic stfifes were the responsiblity of the british. that's a big step, but only half way. the media went wild. you have to shame those kind of media for such shamefull behavior.

so ceasing to tell irish jokes is hardly much of a achievement.