February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The study, commissioned by the British Council Ireland, shows a profound change in Irish attitudes toward the UK in recent years, with the prosperity of the 1990s and the Northern Irish peace process cited as major factors in improving relations between the two countries.
Further proof of the improving Anglo-Irish relations was in evidence at the survey’s launch in Ballsbridge, Dublin, at the British Embassy, no less — the embassy was burned down in 1972, after British paratroopers had shot dead 14 Catholic civilians in Derry on Bloody Sunday. And last weekend, Irish newspapers speculated once more about when Queen Elizabeth II.
The survey, carried out by River Path Associates, examines how Irish people today view the complex relationship between the two countries. For nearly as long as it has been a colonizing taskmaster, Britain also provided generations of Irish men and women with an emigrant destination.
But today, according to the survey’s authors, “perfidious Albion” is “increasingly tangential to Irish identity,” but they find strong and abiding ties through culture and history.
Peppered with quotations throughout from those surveyed, “Through Irish Eyes” finds the Irish today seeing themselves closer to Europe than the U.S., and seeing their relationship to the UK as diminishing in importance.
Respondents noted how their older generations spoke of British cities as familiarly as Irish ones, because many of them had had to go to the UK for work. Young Irish people today say they are more familiar with European cities than British ones, and criticize the UK for trying to act like a great power long after its influence in world affairs has abated.
Northern Ireland continues to be an important wrinkle in the image the Irish have of themselves in relation to Britain, with respondents approving of the level of “forgive and forget” since the start of the peace process.
But the North continues to be a beam in the Irish eye. Others spoke of the North as having been “under English rule for so long that I’d say they’re more English and Irish,” and the complaint that “if you meet someone from Belfast who hasn’t been in the South, they don’t know where Athlone or Cork is.”
On the subject of unification, there is a fairly even three-way split with, among those with an opinion, 35 percent saying there will be a united Ireland, 29 percent saying there will not, and 35 percent saying they don’t know. Nine percent indicated that unification would take place within 10 years.
Complex and often contradictory opinions surface in the survey, particularly toward culture in the two countries: thus London is seen as a great city to visit but still a terrible place to live if you are Irish.
The authors interpret the split as evidence that the goal of unity is increasingly symbolic: the Irish republic in the 21st century is a young, confident nation, forging ahead with its deepening ties in the European Union and around the world, accomplished in culture, sport and trade.