British troops in Dublin during the Easter Rising
St Patrick’s Day across England has always been more of a party than our own St George’s Day. Down the local, one of the best night outs of the year, a non-stop evening drenched in all things Irish. A celebration of Ireland’s freedom, which can never be entirely separated from its place in English, and British, history either.
For decades it was Ireland that defined first the British right (the 'Conservative and Unionist party', remember) and then latterly the street-fighting far right too with their links to loyalist paramilitaries and hatred of all things otherwise from Ireland. Today such connections are broken, the last remnants being the unofficial insertion of ‘no surrender’ into the national anthem (sic) by a section of the football crowd at England internationals. No surrender? To what exactly?
