Wearing of the Poppy! Should Irish citizens wear it?

I didn't mean me personally. I'm confused as to how we fought for so long for independence, eventually got it and the first thing we did was allow the British take over the high street and broadcast into Ireland. Colonialism under a different and far more successful method.

Was working at an opera the other night in the gaiety 7 was really rather disturbed by the amount of people there wearing poppies. Obviously wanna bes/protestants/ people of British descent, but irish people wearing it at all is offensive.

it's a symbol of repression of freedom and the murder of those who tried to oppose that repression. In my view.

RTE is sort of awful though. It's become just a rebroadcaster of BBC and not even the good BBC stuff.. lower third rate nature documentaries every night and the ubiquitous bland and annoying Top gear. The British just see us as a province. we roll over and play good doggie and let them.

So you were saying something about "repression of freedom" yet have a problem with how other people live their lives ?

it affects my life having to listen friends&colleagues constantly on about it..xfactor/big brother/ the effin football

So no such thing as an Irish Protestant ?

Obviously there is.

A good Irish opera was it ?

i was working at it. Wouldn't be a choice I'd make.

How many "High Streets" are there in the Republic ?

Town centres, central business districts, 'down de town'. call em what you will.

If youre suggesting we should jam their signals North Korea is just over there.

Not at all, but why and how are they allowed broadcast into here and to what end other than to colonise via other means?

I've some more hairs here you can split.

Fratton Fred wrote: »

I had a Punjabi neighbour as well. She loved the British for the way they had welcomed her into their country. She was very proud of the fact that the British never ruled the Punjab and was very quick to acknowledge that when her family were thrown out of Uganda, the British gave her a home.

People around the world don't hold any grudges against the British

As always, Fratton Fred, you're first up to paint a romantic/delusional picture of your British state's interaction with the indigenous populations that they were exploiting. It was all, it appears, so glorious when we ruled over the barbarians - here, I've just used a personal anecdote to symbolise the experience of hundreds of millions of people and this shows they were delighted, absolutely delighted old bean, for us British to be robbing and exploiting them for centuries.

It defies belief that any person with any education, or even common sense, could be that blinkered and brainwashed into believing their own state was invading and occupying 25% of planet earth just to help the poor benighted natives. Well done once again, Fratton Fred. You truly are John Bull's representative here on Boards.ie.

Einhard wrote: »

What's lost on yourself and others, in this increasingly mean-spirited and petty thread, is that people project their own meaning onto the poppy. That's what symbols are for. RebelHeart, for example, might see it as a symbol of Britsh imperial oppresion and he's entitled to do so; but someone who wears the poppy might do so in memory of their grandfather, or out of a more vague sense of respect to an entire generation. People wear them for a myriad of different reasons, but some here don't seem to appreciate that. They reduce the poppy to one single interpretation, one that suits their own agenda, and then refuse to countenance the idea that people wear it for any number of reasons, all equally valid. It's personal. That's the point.

This is specious nonsense and if you've any half-decent grasp of English - and evidently you have - you'll be conscious of this. While people may "project their own meaning onto the poppy" it's done so within obvious restrictions which you've intentionally avoided. Why? For instance, the British poppy does not commemorate the victims of British forces in Croke Park or Jallianwala Bagh, among numerous other places. It commemorates only those who perpetrated these, and many other, massacres. The person who commemorates a "grandfather" with the red poppy commemorates somebody who fought for the British Commonwealth's forces. The "generation" which they may commemorate was also a distinctly British/British Empire/Commonwealth generation. It's not the dead of Russia or Germany who are commemorated by the British poppy. Why are you implying it is? The poppy is not "personal" - if it were, you'd be the only person wearing it! It's transparently a national/British Commonwealth symbol, and moreover a very nationalist symbol used nowadays to cynically garner recruitment for the British military. Why are you claiming it's personal?

The poppy is an overtly political symbol which commemorates the military forces of a political state and ideology, Britain and the British Empire/Commonwealth. Yet, head firmly in the sand, you obstinately and dogmatically deny this sectarian/nationalistic reality of the British poppy commemorations. You've even rewritten history and claimed it to be a "personal" symbol. What a coincidence that millions of British nationalists are sharing the same "personal" symbol.:rolleyes: