Why do the British know so little about us?

Badly Drunk Boy wrote: »

Five minutes before the News goes out, somebody says "There's a story about Ireland and it mentions their Prime Minister which they call the Taoiseach. It's pronounced 'tee-shock'. Can you remember that?"

How hard is that? It's not as if they're trying to pronounce 'Muireann' correctly!

Lots of Irish can't pronounce Taoiseach.
Many add a 'h' after the T

Of course we know loads about Britain, our big brother across the sea, and nearly all of our culture is based on theirs. Tea, Coronation st, football, rugby, fry ups...
How much would the average Irish person know about Wales? Probably feck all.

thelad95 wrote: »

That Channel 4 video has been doing the rounds for many years. I'll put my hands up, I would probably make a poor enough effort at partioning Wales and Scotland from England too

Fair enough, but the difference is that we don't share an international border with Wales, Scotland, or England.

The vast majority don't know anything about their history, the real history of their island, including the most darkest aspects of it. The vast majority of the people who worship the royal family aren't even aware of what they are and what they always were, an interbred clan of continental European caravan families that were constantly either marrying or at war with each other, and when the wars kicked off, it was the ordinary person from their own roads and streets that were sent to the slaughter

TheBoyConor wrote: »

or the way they refer to the country as Eire.

Everything about them is just looking down their big protestant noses at us here in Ireland. They always have.

Absolutely and utterly untrue.

Regrettably Britain is a huge part of Irish history which we cannot escape.

The same cannot be said for the British- Ireland is not a large part of their history. They pissed over pretty much the entire world at some stage.

Working class heroes wrote: »

In fairness if it wasn't for the Genocide(Famine) it probably would have been around 24.8m.

So exactly what would those 24.8 million people be doing here? If the population was ever going to get back to pre-famine levels, it has had plenty of chances to do so. Maybe the message is that this island is incapable of supporting a population of greater than 6-7 million????

Church on Tuesday wrote: »

I'm a Irish History grad, I have studied in detail all of those issues. I also lived in England for a time, so have encountered plenty harmless ignorance about Ireland. Most of it pretty funny.

It's just I don't have a chip on my shoulder or an inferiority complex that most Irish people born after 1985 don't have also.

I couldn't give a toss what the English know or don't know about Ireland or what they think of us.

I was born and lived in the UK the first 9 years of my life. I currently live in the Uk. Have done so the last few years, and at a time when Ireland was being discussed in terms of Brexit it was alarming how many British people didn't understand the implications of a hard border.


History, literally within most people's lifetimes.

This ignorance has fed into the sense of British exceptionalism which props its head up. Be it the war, Churchill etc.

There is a sense of Britain is still great and that is down to what they're spoon-fed in school and constantly being told of their noble achievements. That what they did was good and what they did was right.

This has created the mindset in England you see today. For things like....

Brexit, wherein the voters who voted leave have deluded themselves somehow cutting nearly 500 million people as a market place is fine because they believe they still have enough eminence in the world to be a world power. Which, they are, in some areas, but are absolutely nowhere near to where they were 100 years ago.

Anti-immigration: NHS non national workers being turfed out or having to pay to work for the NHS is an example. The lack of understanding that their nation/empire has always been propped up by those of other nations. Because British people will get Britain back to its "former glory".

It's a pervading sense of blind jingoistic behaviour that is strong here in the UK. The basic level of historical understanding among the average British person is alarming. They have a world history and they barely know any of it. I could tell you the basic history of Ireland from the famine upwards and most could tell you important aspects of Irish history.

Being sensitive to your shared history as a nation means you can understand, grown and learn. As pointed out above that has not been the case and as an Irish person, bothers me in the extreme that they were so unbothered about the border and what it means to Ireland and what it could do. If they thought better of us and knew better of us, even just that issue I wouldn't be bothered. But they don't and other nations/people suffer because of it.