After some 20 years living in Dublin, Austin Currie has come to a conclusion: people in the 26 counties are hypocritical. He delivered this judgement at a recent seminar which examined a study into Irish attitudes to Britain, entitled Through Irish Eyes.
Garret Fitzgerald, chair at the seminar, said his fellow Fine Gaeler's response was typically blunt and northern.
Nice one, Garret. That's two stereotypes in rapid succession – southerners are hypocritical, northerners are forthright.
Like most stereotypes, both are rubbish, but then Fine Gael has always had an impressive capacity to ingest and reproduce rubbish.
The Irish Eyes study highlights a number of inconsistencies in southern thinking.
For example, many Irish people support English football clubs, yet they like to see the English team lose. And while more than two-thirds of young professionals in the south want a united Ireland, some have a jaundiced view of the north. 'The people, their clothes, their way of life' is the most widely quoted of their comments.
Young southerners are more likely to feel good about Scotland, Wales, London and the Manchester/ Liverpool region than they are about the north.
Hypocritical? Hardly. So the report finds that most people in the south want a united Ireland but few are prepared to help make it happen. That's not hypocrisy, that's human nature. Ask people in the north would they like a better health service, ask people in Britain would they like better schools, ask people in the US do they think politicians should be more accountable, you'll get a yes yes yes to all of those questions.
But if you ask the same people are they prepared to do anything to bring these things about, you'll get a shrug of the shoulders.
A sad truth: most people know what they want but aren't prepared to be proactive.
If the south has a problem, it's ignorance rather than hypocrisy. Only one% of those polled had lived in the north, whereas 16% had lived in London. Nearly 60% had friends or relatives in London, but only 14% in the north.
In short, a knowledge gap exists, which means that people in the south rely on the media.
Since southern and British media feature the north only when there's a political crisis or some act of violence, the image of the north becomes that of a place where people are continually at each other's throats.
Hardly surprising, then, that the population south of the border doesn't feel too positive about what lies north of the border.
Mind you, it works the other way as well. Northern middle-class nationalists love their weekends in Dublin and their holiday homes in Donegal, but live south of the border? Forget it. That's because, in their cliche book, southerners are disorganised, are charming
but unreliable, have backward schools, primitive hospitals and funny accents.
In other words and to some extent, partition has worked.
Separated for nearly a hundred years now, we've developed distorted images of each other.
The Irish Eyes report combines factual information of this kind with some clever spinning.
It talks, for example, of the south's attitudes to Britain becoming more 'normal' as time passes and bitter memories begin to fade. There is no suggestion that Britain's present policy to Ireland might act as a brake on normalisation – it's the Irish who need to get normal, not the British. The report's sub-text is unmistakeable: those in Ireland who see Britain as anything less than fair and friendly are stuck in the past, those who accept Britain as benevolent and neutral are forward-looking.
Sorry, chaps. It won't wash.
People in Ireland no longer equate criticism of Britain with bigotry, or commitment to national unity with extremism. Try this little test. Which northern political party this week called for
- the immediate establishment of a consultative forum to represent civic society across the island
- progress on cross-border issues, including the development of an all-Ireland autism centre and an all-Ireland animal health strategy
- the creation of seven new north-south bodies, including a criminal assets bureau, food marketing, human rights and transport, and an all-Ireland energy market.
No, not Sinn Féin. That's the SDLP's demands, as articulated by former finance minister Sean Farren.
Not bad for a party that, a few years back, was post-nationalist. That's what the Through Irish Eyes report forgot or chose not to show: far from abandoning their goal of national unity, increasing numbers of nationalists, north and south, have begun taking practical steps to see that it is realised.
For southern and northern nationalists, ignorance fathered by division is on the run. For unionists, alarm bells are ringing.
