'we, here in Ireland as in so many other former colonies of your Empire, are now quite sophisticated enough to be able to understand that you did need to maintain the Empire, in order to maintain the standard of living that it gave you.'

I find that somewhat offensive. My mother and father both grew up in the town of St Helens, lancashire in - born 1919, an 1916 repectively. They both knew literal starvation as children. The streets in which they lived had people die of TB in every single house - theirs included. The whole town was covered literally in a pall of rain clouds containing sulphuric acid from the glass and chemical factories.

When my mother got ill with rheumatic fever as child - the only place they could send her to recuperate was her Irish family, where apparently a more wholesome diet and relatively cleaner environment was apparently still within the reach of some of the ordinary people.

having big estates over in Ireland might have benefited a few rich English bastards, but surely you are sophisticated enough to understand the folksinger Dick Gaughan's point when he wrote:-

'Irish and Scottish people are sometimes slow to recognise that the first victims of the British Empire were in fact the English people themselves.'