Everything that could be written about the Saville Report has already been. But yesterday's reactions on both sides of the water said much about both countries. Or did it?
To a certain sort of Irishman, there's nothing more English than an Old Etonian Conservative Prime Minister speaking at the Dispatch Box of the House of Commons. As David Cameron did yesterday when responding to Saville.
To a certain sort of Englishman, there's nothing more Irish than a crowd marching through a city on the island to protest about a past atrocity. As people did yesterday in Londonderry (as that certain sort of Englishman would call it) when responding to Savile.
Cameron wasn't unemotional. But he was impersonal, rational - and he kept his stiff upper lip. The relatives of the dead weren't unreasonable. But they were, understandably, personal, fervent - and, well, whatever the gaelic term for the opposite of stiff upper lip is. The House of Commons, with its clipped questions and responses made to a third party (the Speaker), might almost have been designed to embody a certain English formality. Yesterday's Bogside crowd, with its banners of the dead carried like icons of the saints, might almost have been composed to illustrate the wounds of nationalist Ireland's past.
Whatever one's view of Saville, it can surely be agreed that yesterday will have done nothing to diminish mutual stereotypes. Which is why it's worth remembering that there's another Ireland, another England. I declare an interest. I'm a Unionist, who was opposed to much of the "peace process" (that slippery term), and married into an Irish family.
To that certain sort of Irishman, the English are perfidious, repressed, murdering snobs. To that certain sort of Englishman (oh, and Scotsman), the Irish are manipulative, idle, devious, paddies. But how typical are either? England is dotted with fake Irish pubs. They're presumably marketed to English drinkers - for their supposed warmth, informality, "craic". Ireland is targetted by UK media outlets. This is presumably because Irish consumers, inter alia, watch Sky Sports, follow Corrie, and read News of the World.
And if the English are so inhibited, how are the X Factor, Ann Summers, and Diana's funeral to be explained? If the Irish are so useless, how come a Fianna Fail government cut taxes with a relish unknown since...well, since Lawson and Thatcher? How come the Irish economy was, until recently, out-performing ours on many measures? (Don't blame Irish enterprise if it isn't now; blame the Irish politicians who joined the Euro.)
Irish soldiers fought in the UK's wars. Ireland's national poet was an Englishman. (OK, he wasn't: but Yeats' family probably came to Ireland from Yorkshire at the end of the eighteenth century.) England and Ireland aren't separate, but intertwined by generations of trade, friendship, marriage, and the intermingling of bloodlines. Yesterday's scenes weren't the whole story, or even the greater part of it.
