You sometimes read or hear misty-eyed shanachies talking of some special relationship between Ireland, and especially Dublin, and Manchester United. I don t know why, but that s what is said. Of course, there are other angles. My late uncle, a real Dublin salt, was a lifelong Liverpool fan. Twin lungs, was what he said of Dublin and Liverpool and the Irish Sea.

Now, I m an agnostic. I don t believe in special relationships between Dublin and Manchester United any more than I believe in a special place in Ireland for Celtic. But I digress.
It appears that not everyone subscribes to this blurred vision. Some weeks ago, when the Manchester United shop was opened in Dublin, supporters of the National League picketed the event, and sang You re Brits and you know you are to the tune of the chorus of Go West .
Yeah, you think it s boring at first. But then you begin to pick up on things. Little incidents, things overheard. You know. After a while you start to see everything differently. The League fans seem unpleasantly nationalistic, and potentially fascist but they still represent a barometer of opinion. What they d do and how they d fare, if a roots-oriented right-wing party started making noise is an important question and one that demands an answer. But for now, they seem to have rung an important bell. Support Irish, they seem to say but who s doing Irish?
Why do I ask? Well, I noticed a report in the Sunday Tribune recently which said that RTE s show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? has lost 25% of its audience, and is now in danger of losing its status as the country s most popular television show to Coronation Street.
Huh? It seems the Irish are so devoid of ideas and cultural identity that the most popular show is a rip-off of a UK show, and the second most popular is a British soap. And gobshite politicians still bellow about independence and how the Brits were shown the door? Come on! The island is more British than ever before!
It isn t a function of the modern Irish society, the so-called Celtic Tiger culture. No, Coronation Street typically appeals to a broad cross-section of society, but does not include young males and men in general. That, I suppose, is why we have soccer. And the young (and old) men of the island worship at much the same altars as their sisters and partners, Manchester and London, in the main.
I remember the squeamish reaction to John Bruton s schoolboyish joy at the visit of Prince Charles some years ago. The then Taoiseach seemed thrilled on a personal level. It seemed to be that this day his Prince had come, rather than some aristo representative of the United Kingdom. It seemed very un-republican to many, though Fine Gael describes itself as a republican party, and many also felt that it confirmed their prejudice that Fine Gael and all its supporters in the shires and in Dartland were West Brits.
So they might be, but this misrepresented the truth, because so too, in any meaningful sense, were huge numbers of the sans-culottes that other political parties and movements would claim to represent. Workers and small farmers were and are much the same as the socialites, as their avid consumption of British outputs makes clear.
James Connolly argued that it made no difference to the workers if you simply changed the flag that flew over the Government buildings. If ownership of capital and the means of production remained in the same hands, there was no point.
Well, on the whole that s the way it proved. There has been huge change in the state, and much of it for the better, but the weak are still weak and the poor are still poor. But of course, the structures of the economy have changed a great deal since then, as have the forces that shape our lives. He could not have forecast the latter-day importance of the media or the information revolution, and certainly not Eamon Dunphy s web-site.
Perhaps, if he had he would have foreseen the amazing rapidity with which the Irish returned to the British Isles, particularly in the realms of sport and entertainment (insofar as there is now any meaningful distinction between them). We ll keep the reds flags flying here.
You may call it interesting, some might call it sad and others not, but the Irish have far more in common with the British than the pipe-smokers would allow. Blood and DNA, for a start. For better or worse. We should acknowledge the better, because it does exist. But you can see the worst on any weekend in and around Temple Bar.
Perhaps there is some residual concern for otherness, I don t know. There have been remarkably few dissenting voices, apart from the National League supporters. The need to sell newspapers, for example, makes it difficult to object. So, again by way of example, the Sunday Tribune will have a game from the Premiership on its lead sports page without exception, unless Ireland have won a rugby match, or Sonia O Sullivan a race.
Well, we ll see how things develop.
In the meantime, I was fascinated by the concern with recent violence and the possible implication of Red Bull. Frankly, my dears, I doubt that Red Bull has anything to do with it. It s the seven pints and three or four vodkas that do the damage. But then, we ll always look for scapegoats.
In a country with no red press to speak of, and coarsened by the intrusion of tabloidism, it seems that all we get for our pains is a Red Bull to a rag.
The Hog