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Thread: why shouldn't Ireland have a 'hard' border?!

  1. #41
    Senior Member SIR's Avatar
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    Cool Re: why shouldn't Ireland have a 'hard' border?!

    Quote Originally Posted by Empty_of_Clouds View Post
    You are kind of suggesting that, as a thought experiment, we go and ensconce a monarch in these places and see what happens.
    Not at all, I am suggesting that you need to realise that removing the so-called British 'royal' family from their established positions would in no way change the number of tourists who come to visit the UK, and even that such an act might improve visitor numbers.

    You claimed my example of Italy was a statistical outlier, so naturally I must bring your attention to USA and China who have massive tourism revenue and are both well established republics.

    Quote Originally Posted by Empty_of_Clouds View Post
    This looks like a deliberate provocation just for the sake of it.
    Not really, actually a genuine casual query regarding your time spent in the company of Chinese society and whether they are aware, and if they are what they think, of your counter-revolutionary tendencies.

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    Default Re: why shouldn't Ireland have a 'hard' border?!

    Your wording is provocative, and I believe this is deliberate. Your ascribing of tendencies to people you don't know anything about kind of cements this point. Any argument with regarding monarchies is without merit because it appears your mind is closed to any view other than your own.

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    Default Re: why shouldn't Ireland have a 'hard' border?!

    Quote Originally Posted by SIR View Post

    ....Not really, actually a genuine casual query regarding your time spent in the company of Chinese society and whether they are aware, and if they are what they think, of your counter-revolutionary tendencies.
    wtf is this?

    hello, Ireland?

    Sent from my Moto E (4) using Tapatalk

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    Senior Member Pendragon's Avatar
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    Default Re: why shouldn't Ireland have a 'hard' border?!

    Quote Originally Posted by TSherbs View Post
    Which attributed quote do you think is made up? There are no unnamed sources, no hidden stats. What is it about this piece that you don't trust? It is long, so you get to use your own mind and test its thinking through the linkages. It's not all that complex or nuanced. It's central claim is that the Compromise has been widely supported and has brought violence and fear far down from the peak in the Troubles. This is not a radical or biased claim. It's virtually a given, now. To upset that improving trend requires strong exigencies of a greater and real threat (and not just to one's sensibilities).
    I did not say that any particular quote was made up, only that biased publications are unreliable sources of information. For example, this quote makes it seem like a sectarian conflict is inevitable if there is a hard border after Brexit:

    "A Sky News poll published Monday found that approximately half of people in Northern Ireland have few to no friends of a different religion to theirs—a metric that also stands in for political divisions. These are evident in the country’s government, or rather, its lack of one. Though one of the Good Friday Agreement’s principle achievements was the establishment of a power-sharing arrangement that allows Unionists and Republicans to govern in coalition, a political row between the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and its Republican counterpart Sinn Féin caused Northern Ireland’s government to collapse in January 2017."

    A poll in the Belfast Telegraph implies the opposite:

    "Voters in Northern Ireland will back a united Ireland after Brexit, a new poll suggests."

    Quotes are easy, one can be found to support any position. There problem is that the mainstream media in the US is becoming increasingly partisan, and thus increasingly questionable as a news source.

    In the case of newspapers, I have twice seen them report several events with a few kernels of truth, but with the rest largely made up. It wasn't like they were trying to be biased or dishonest, but simply treating reporting like a creative writing class assignment in school. An alternative weekly newspaper in my area used to regularly report blatant inaccuracies and conflicts of interest in stories reported by one of these newspapers, a much older, larger daily. It was shocking to see some of the nonsense that went on, especially glaring omissions to cover up misdeeds by local politicians and some of their business associates. One accurate story will not make a publication a reliable source of information overall. The stories that sell, that play to the audience, and don't antagonize the wrong people, are paramount.

  5. #45
    Senior Member SIR's Avatar
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    Default Re: why shouldn't Ireland have a 'hard' border?!

    Quote Originally Posted by Empty_of_Clouds View Post
    Your wording is provocative, and I believe this is deliberate. Your ascribing of tendencies to people you don't know anything about kind of cements this point. Any argument with regarding monarchies is without merit because it appears your mind is closed to any view other than your own.
    touché?

  6. #46
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    Default Re: why shouldn't Ireland have a 'hard' border?!

    Quote Originally Posted by Pendragon View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by TSherbs View Post
    Which attributed quote do you think is made up? There are no unnamed sources, no hidden stats. What is it about this piece that you don't trust? It is long, so you get to use your own mind and test its thinking through the linkages. It's not all that complex or nuanced. It's central claim is that the Compromise has been widely supported and has brought violence and fear far down from the peak in the Troubles. This is not a radical or biased claim. It's virtually a given, now. To upset that improving trend requires strong exigencies of a greater and real threat (and not just to one's sensibilities).
    I did not say that any particular quote was made up, only that biased publications are unreliable sources of information. For example, this quote makes it seem like a sectarian conflict is inevitable if there is a hard border after Brexit:...

    .
    The article does not argue for inevitability. It shows that the situation is complex, with multiple tensions even though in the larger sense violence is down. It is you who is reading "inevitability" from this.

    To the rest of your point, of course any single source, any single article, cannot explain all the facts and factors. News journalism is not a research-based book-length publication. Even books ultimately have to have a thesis that it ends up trying to prove. Even this is a form of bias, to be technical. But rather than dismiss all, it is better to read all and decide for oneself (where more biases and filters reside). It's the best we have.



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    Junior Member snoopy's Avatar
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    Default Re: why shouldn't Ireland have a 'hard' border?!

    Having a hard border at Northern Ireland would break a key clause in a previously agreed internationally ratified peace accord - namely, the Good Friday Agreement. The EU had a very significant role in bringing that together (as did the US at the time), so I can fully understand their desire to see it preserved. Apart from that the purely practical side of functioning would be put under considerable strain. There are economic consequences for both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, but the economists seem to have decided that it will be extremely negative for Northern Ireland, possibly creating an economic wilderness and further isolation. Such vacuums in Europe usually give a foothold to certain far right thinking and deeper radicalisation; at least historically they have. Economics isn't the only thing though. 'The Troubles' were very much focused in Derry, Belfast and along the border. The EU has significantly funded peace projects in the cities and those which span the border in an attempt at bringing communities together and dispelling suspicion and ignorance. It's hard to drill down into exact figures, but it's somewhere in the region of a couple of hundred million per annum (taking into consideration both the Republic and the UK EU budget specific to Northern Ireland). It covers all sorts of things like infrastructure, arts, sports, literature, community groups etc, etc. With an hard border that will be much more difficult to do, especially if you have one community with a renewed antipathy to the EU and suspicion of it. The social aspects will be significantly effected by a hard border and many thousands of families will feel a line - albeit somewhat imaginary - has been drawn between them as their families and communities live either side of the proposed hard border. There are many, many other reasons, but these stated above are perhaps the main ones.

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    Default Re: why shouldn't Ireland have a 'hard' border?!

    Consider this, in addition: while PM Boris Johnson says he will ignore the agreement with the EU over keeping the no-hard-border between the Republic of Ireland and the UK's Northern Ireland, VP Joe Biden says that, if he is elected President of the US, he will not look favorably on a free-trade agreement with a hard-border UK government. President Trump seems to have promised Johnson that the US will make up a free-trade agreement to soften UK losses after Brexit.

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    Default Re: why shouldn't Ireland have a 'hard' border?!

    It is more than time for a new USA President to keep his nose out of British domestic policies , heavens knows he is going to have enough problems state side! As a person from Northern Ireland, I could not overstate how much we resented US presidents sticking their nose in our situation! How would Biden react to criticism and advice by British Prime Ministers to any one of the social and domestic problems in America? Not too well I suspect!

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    Default Re: why shouldn't Ireland have a 'hard' border?!

    (1) Trump supported and encouraged Brexit

    (2) Trump promised that a Bexit'ed UK would "quickly" get a nice trade deal with the US

    (3) Trump lost, and lost by the same electoral vote by which he won in 2016, but by bigger margins in the swing states. His term runs out in January, and he seems to have lost hope.

    (4) There is no reason that President Biden would carry out Trump's promise to, somehow, compensate the UK for whatever it loses through Brexit.

    (5) The "soft border" was a key to the Good Friday peace. No reason to expect that US policy will change to back a "hard border" in Ireland, against the previous agreement between the UK and EU. Certainly not just to keep Boris Johnson from being embarrassed. Johnson chose to become best-buddy of Trump, so, while the US will continue to be closely allied to the UK, there is no reason for President Biden to change what has been US policy. Trump was a freak, or, as Biden keeps saying, "an aberration". Whether Trump's variety of racism, xenophobia, and friendliness to near-dictators continues, and even rises to challenge for control of the country, for the next four years Trump is out, and, it appears, and US policy will return to what it has been ever since Lend-Lease, and since Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill announced the Atlantic Charter.

  12. #51
    Senior Member SIR's Avatar
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    Default Re: why shouldn't Ireland have a 'hard' border?!

    Quote Originally Posted by welch View Post
    (1) Trump supported and encouraged Brexit

    (2) Trump promised that a Bexit'ed UK would "quickly" get a nice trade deal with the US

    (3) Trump lost, and lost by the same electoral vote by which he won in 2016, but by bigger margins in the swing states. His term runs out in January, and he seems to have lost hope.

    (4) There is no reason that President Biden would carry out Trump's promise to, somehow, compensate the UK for whatever it loses through Brexit.

    (5) The "soft border" was a key to the Good Friday peace. No reason to expect that US policy will change to back a "hard border" in Ireland, against the previous agreement between the UK and EU. Certainly not just to keep Boris Johnson from being embarrassed. Johnson chose to become best-buddy of Trump, so, while the US will continue to be closely allied to the UK, there is no reason for President Biden to change what has been US policy. Trump was a freak, or, as Biden keeps saying, "an aberration". Whether Trump's variety of racism, xenophobia, and friendliness to near-dictators continues, and even rises to challenge for control of the country, for the next four years Trump is out, and, it appears, and US policy will return to what it has been ever since Lend-Lease, and since Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill announced the Atlantic Charter.
    aw, shit... well, never mind, eh?

    Guess us Brits (English) are gonna have to stop paying for everyone else in so-called Europe's economic deficit, including the Welsh and Scots, it seems - let them have their independence and get treated the same by EU as we did.

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    Senior Member Linger's Avatar
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    Default why shouldn't Ireland have a 'hard' border?!

    Quote Originally Posted by SIR View Post
    Guess us Brits (English) are gonna have to stop paying for everyone else in so-called Europe's economic deficit, including the Welsh and Scots, it seems - let them have their independence and get treated the same by EU as we did.
    Wow. A factually incorrect and morally tendentious statement. I guess with that attitude, you are better at your own.
    Last edited by Linger; November 20th, 2020 at 05:07 AM.

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    Default Re: why shouldn't Ireland have a 'hard' border?!

    Quote Originally Posted by A Smug Dill View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by Linger View Post
    Wow. A factually incorrect and morally tendentious statement. I guess with that attitude, you are better at your own.
    @Linger, I think you really ought to edit your post so that it's abundantly clear you were replying to @SIR and levelling your criticism at him and not @welch.

    Not really any of your business though is it?

  15. #54
    Senior Member Linger's Avatar
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    Default Re: why shouldn't Ireland have a 'hard' border?!

    Well, he is correct, and I have corrected my post.

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    Default Re: why shouldn't Ireland have a 'hard' border?!

    Perhaps he is not the only one.

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