Two Nations

The echoes are uncanny. In Britain first and then Ireland, two finance ministers followed upon two "successful" prime ministers, both of whom retired as millionaires, and each new prime minister then leads his party to political disaster.

Both countries have run up intolerable debts in the past 15 years, both countries have a huge and unmanageable public service, and both countries have an underclass equally averse to self-advancement and sobriety. The strange Hiberno-British dance through time continues, though it obeys no known rules of science or of history.

And whereas Irish people are good at remembering history -- usually inaccurately, and involving evictions, the Famine and the Black and Tans -- English people have almost no historical memory at all. I suspect it is precisely because of the utter awfulness of their history that the English lost the facility to remember.

The Norman conquest of England was one of the most terrible events in European history. Not merely was the entire ruling class of England either butchered or exiled, the entire apparatus of the state and church and commerce was handed over to a French-speaking caste of conquerors.

The new aristocracy, the parliament, lawyers and the church were all French-speaking. All laws were in French for 300 years. The emerging urban crafts of meat-provider, arrow-maker, builder and beard-trimmer spoke French: hence the trades and the surnames, Butcher, Fletcher, Mason and Barber.

The Anglo-Saxons were slaves in their own country, compelled by ferocious law to build the great cathedrals that are now the glory of England. To be sure, this racial exclusion wasn't of the same duration as the Irish penal laws, which lasted about a century. No indeed: the exclusion of the native Anglo-Saxons from real power lasted over three centuries, during which the collective punishment for the murder of a French-speaker anywhere in England, if the culprit was not found, was the forfeiture to the crown of all Anglo-Saxon owned farms in the area.

The unconscious but long-term influence of these times is visible in the English hatred of the foreigner and of the aristocracy, which expressed itself in the Reformation, and in the English Civil War. This racial/class division in English life was behind the emergence of the two main parties: the Whigs, of Norman extraction, and the Tories, the remnants of the Anglo-Saxon squires. This division was, in time, partly eroded by the social catastrophe of the Industrial Revolution, which also rendered the English working classes physically unfit for service as soldiers. Fortunately for England, there was a neighbouring island full of well-fed strapping young men who could be recruited into its imperial armies.

But the Famine sets Ireland apart, surely? Certainly it does in its psychological impact, but not in its overall death-toll. The life-expectancy of a child who survived birth in the slums of English cities in the 1840s was around 16. How many people perished prematurely through malnutrition and disease in England between 1815 and 1865? Maybe as many as died in the Irish Famine.

The lesson the English apparently learnt from their terrible history was to forget everything; and the lesson the Irish learnt was to cling on to the useful bits.

Two peoples, two islands, two terrible histories, and two completely different psychological refuges. The outcome today? Apparently, pretty much the same. All of which belongs to the "well, f**k me" school of historical theory.

Condensed from Kevin Myers column in the Irish Independent.