Mick, you're dead right there. Everything I know about British involvement in Ireland, I've learnt after school (and much of it as a direct result of talking with people here). Similarly, they don't tell you in schools that the British *invented* the concentration camp.

Wolfgang, I went over to Germany a couple of times with school exchanges, one before and one after the Wiedervereinigung. I was really shocked by the number of German kids my age saying "I hate Turks, they're getting houses given to them for free, etc". But you can hear the same all over the place - some bloke at a beer festival last weekend was saying exactly the same about illegal immigrants in Britain. What it seems to be is that they none of them have much contact with these people, and it's all too easy for them to talk hate in the abstract. Scares the crap out of me.

Graham.