Why Is Ireland Divided? - Americans React

We check out the reason why Ireland split in this video. This video is very short but very informative for new people to just get a peek into a new subject.

00:00 - Intro
01:34 - Reaction
05:06 - Outro


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#Ireland #Split #AmericansReact

[doctordunc]

This explains the partition (in a basic way, but manages to remain pretty neutral) but you probably need to watch some content re: "the troubles" - i.e. what happened between the 1960s and 1990s.

[littleannie]

You should look into the troubles in Northern Ireland which were a huge problem for many years. There is still tension and animosity between the two sides but things are now much better than they were.

[tonybuckley]

being an Irishman, that’s a dark rabbit hole.. let’s keep things light and breezy shall we ..

[fullenglishbreakfast]

It's all bollocks. I was born into a orange prod family and brainwashed all my childhood. I ended up joining the army and patrolling the streets of northern Ireland and my attitude completely changed. Now as a 47 year old man I have a wife who is Catholic and a very good friend who was in the ira. Bigoted and religious views growing up as a child is the problem while some still hold these opinions. The problem will never go away while religion is involved, it certainly has a lot to answer for

[caoimhemurphy]

Trust me when I say as an Irish person that there still is even to this day a lot of animosity and tension. It's a bit of a sore topic. That was a very condensed version of events, and there was a lot more went on there then was explained. We were oppressed by the British for nearly 1000 years. At 2:35 its saying that we were "harassed" for speaking our language or practicing our religion etc... it was so much more then that. Harassed is putting it mildly. When the Catholics were forbidden from practicing our religion they decided they'd hold secret masses in hidden fields around the country, these are called mass rocks, and if they were caught the Priest would be executed and the attendees imprisoned. Thanks to the British rule our language is quickly fading away. There was a time when we spoke all Irish, but when we were forbidden we quickly became a primarily English speaking country. To be quiet honest it's a miracle we still do have some bit of the language after being forbidden to speak it for so long. Its still taught in schools today, but there are actually very few natives who can speak the language fluently, which is actually really sad because its such a beautiful language, but it's also a dying language. Back during An Gort Móre (The Great Famine) (1845-1851), it was primarily because of the English that we had so many deaths. Our main food source was potatoes and then they got blight. There was food there but the English refused to give us some, not to mention any other bit of food that we did have they took it off of us. The famine caused the population of Ireland to drop dramatically. We went from a population of about 8.5 million to being only about 3/4million. To this day our population has never recovered. There is roughly about 4.8 million people in Ireland today. The Troubles ended a few years before I was born, but my mam has told me about how bad it got. I'm from Cork in the Republic, but I do have a friend whos from Belfast up in the North, and shes Catholic. She seems to be relatively ok up there now, but her parents and grandparents use come to Cork every year in the month of July because of the marches in Belfast. They could have been killed up there in July because they were Catholics, and that was only there back in the 90s/early 2000s. Even for a Catholic from the Republic now to go up to the North, it is so dangerous if they were to go into a protestant area. To this day tensions still run high between the North and the Republic. There is so much that I didn't mention there from the 1916 Easter Rebellion (The Rising) and the execution of its leaders to the late great Micheal Collins and his assassination. This is actually the week of Michael Collins anniversary, he will be dead 100 years. He was assassinated on the 22nd of August 1922 in Béal na Blà in West Cork. There is so much going on in order to commemorate Irelands fallen hero. If you get a chance I would highly recommend that you watch the Micheal Collins film with Liam Neeson and Julia Roberts.

[garydalziel]

I hope you haven't opened a can of worms, Ireland is a very very touchy subject.

[jeffgraham]

Best thing you can do on this subject is avoid it at all costs, feelings still run very high and the wrong word in the wrong place can cause serious offence.

[gastrickbunsen]

I'm from the North and, as I was born on the island of Ireland consider myself Irish. Some staunch unionists still don't consider themselves as Irish, meanwhile they've been raising children on the Island for over 400 years.
Personally, I wouldn't care who governed me as long as I had parity with my peers.
This was not the case under rule from London's Westminster, nor under the Unionists in Stormont.
The Troubles began because some people born into catholic families had the audacity to ask for equal rights in housing, employment, local elections, the cessation of Gerrymandering and the abolishment of the B-Specials.
The Troubles lasted until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, twenty-nine years of turmoil and anguish for what?
Now, the sabre rattling has begun again because of Brexit.

[karinmcinally]

As people have said you should look into the troubles. I did summer camp in the mid west 1993. When finished I travelled and had to fly back from New York. My biggest shock after coming back from Canada was going into an Irish bar with people I had met on the train was an IRA collection tin sitting on the bar. I spent the next 3 years living in London. Suspect packages closed stations, you had to be vigilant that people took their belongings with them. And it was always fun when head office phoned and you had to do incendiary device checks in all the clothing on rails in the store. There were some horrific bombings in London and Birmingham caused by car bombs. But this was nothing compared to what people were living with in Ireland.

[carlhartwell]

This video is a joke, I mean while it isn't _technically_ wrong, there is still such a thing as 'lying by omission'! And heck this video omitted a lot! I mean okay, it was about 'the split' but 4:36 _'lasting peace'?_ I mean wtf, it could have just mentioned the 'bit of trouble' occurring until the late 90's!

That's literally all I would have needed though, just for the narrator to merely 'mention' something like...

_'This 'peace' hardly lasted in reality, while there has been 'peace' between Ireland and the UK in principle, there have also been thousands of deaths in the intervening yrs relating to 'the split'._

Try living in Belfast in the 70's and 80's Mr Narrator, tell me if you're 'living in peace'!

[mfrostw]

Think of Texas as Northern Ireland and Mexico as Ireland and the USA as the UK. Texas was part of Mexico but was divided from it because most of its residents were Americans who had moved in to the area over many years and wanted self-determination as part of the US rather than part of Mexico.

[Glyn]

It's a start, but as others have said, you need to understand "The Troubles" between 1968 and 1998 to understand where we are today - it's estimated that 3, 500 people died and 47, 000 were injured during this period.

To note that parts of Northern Ireland are very much Catholic, including Derry, of "Derry Girls" fame - the series is set just before relative peace broke out with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. Sadly, as a result of Brexit that peace is being put at risk again, but that is yet another story.

[vaudevillian]

It gets really complicated when you consider the United Irishmen, early advocates of Irish nationalism and cultural revival, whose leadership was heavily Protestant

[daveyp]

Semi-spontaneous? Is that like the "mostly peaceful riots" in 2020? The original plan for the Easter rebellion included help from the Germans, who Britain was at war with. The role of the Spanish, French and Germans (and later Soviet Union, Libya etc.) in the story of Ireland is often overlooked.

[davidholden]

History Matters videos are great but they only scratch the surface and are very simplistic. The history of Ireland is very complicated and still a very politically charged subject today.

[mrsuperger]

Its an incredibly complex issue, and not just a simplistic religious matter. As example, the nearby neighbour country of Scotland is named after a conquering Irish tribe, the Scotti. Even the famous St Patrick, is a captured slave from Britain.

[daveofyorkshire]

There were "Troubles" right up to 1998 when the Belfast Agreement (aka Good Friday Agreement) was signed.

The USA through NORAID funded the IRA for decades which bombed the UK regularly including bombing the hotel the government was in, bombing a band stand killing horses, also when two smaller bombs exploded in litter bins outside shops and businesses on Bridge Street. Two children were killed and a total of 56 people were injured. It was indiscriminate destruction. Not that the British military were saints...

The ceasefire was an achievement and personally I find those that could let go of the need for retribution in both sides exceptional people. But peace is never easy after war there are always victims on both sides.

[andywilliams]

As others have said, that video only provides the most basic and brief overview. In reality, there was a hell of a lot more to it. It was, and unfortunately still is, albeit in a much smaller way, a very divisive issue. A lot of civil war violence happened for many years because of it. This was known as the Troubles. Even today there is still much tension in Northern Ireland about the issue. One of the main reasons why Northern Ireland traditionally saw itself as much more British was because of the massively higher amount of Scottish Protestant immigration into Northern Ireland.

[ronaldobrien]

What the video didn't address is that Catholics / Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland were deeply unhappy with partition of the island and had no wish to remain in the UK.

[UnknownUser-rbpd]

Irish people drive on the left the same as the British. The EU issue is currently causing trouble for Brexit as the 1990s peace agreement that stopped the Troubles, agreed to keep the Irish border open between Norther Ireland and Eire (Southern Ireland). This means that now the UK has left the EU single market, that customs checks have to take place for UK goods going into Eire and EU goods going into UK. The only way to do both things was to make Northern Ireland a special case and allow it free access to the EU single market (which has been very beneficial to Northern Ireland economic performance) but that means a border (sort of) between the rest of the UK and Northern Ireland. And having that border (for goods) between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK has upset the strong Unionist politicians in Northern Ireland who fear it is the first step to separating Norther Ireland from the UK. Simple 🙂