A red card given early
Head butt off you go
Made me think of Anglo-Irish relations
A problem not very long ago
A century of troubles
Indeed from famine times
Trevelyan Lord John Russell
Neglect and other crimes
Parnell and Redmond
Lloyd George and the War
That fateful Easter Rising
And the man shot in a chair
And then the bitter fighting
Auxiliaries Black and Tans
The struggle for the Treaty
Man on Irish man
Scotland Wales at rugby
Are battles keenly fought
And England is the ancient foe
Political juggernaut
But England versus Ireland
Here now strangers meet
We dared to leave the empire
Your guns blew up our street
The wounds they are not healed yet
Memories linger long
And people on both sides have lost
A daughter and a son
And what will slow the process
Is ignorance on both sides
If we do not make the effort
Then walls will us divide
Old attitudes were awful
I saw them with my eyes
England was hated
Ireland was despised
We need an active real intent
Neighbours now to be
And help each other along the road
For true prosperity
Brian Fahy
12 March 2022
+ Ireland has long depended on England for work and for trade even as it found English rule unwelcome. We have lived with a hundred years of resentment between the two countries since the bloody separation took place. I think that England, in the main, politically, lives as if Ireland does not exist.
Erris Poetry 