No offense to anyone on here, but there's a lot of misunderstanding about Ireland among Americans, including left of centre Americans.
Ireland is not the mystical land of saints, scholars, lepachrauns and comely maidens dancing at crossroads that some picture, but a modern capitalist highly developed largely urbanised society with all of the good and bad points that that brings - significant drugs issues and a massive property crisis whereby ordinary workers are priced out of the market similar to the likes of Silicon Valley, among other things, though fortunately fentalyn hasn't hit these shores.
The majority involved in the protests are most likely Eastern Europeans (including Russians, by the way). There is a huge Eastern European community here. Make no mistake, the current government, while they are definitely saying the right things about the invasion, are right of centre (at least by European standards, perhaps less so by US). We even had a few Trump wannabes ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Casey ) who fortunately have made little traction here. The idea that a few plucky brave Irish fishermen resisted Russian encroachments recently is fantasy-land stuff, btw. They did so with the backing of UK military behind the scenes (not that I am criticising them). In spite of Brexit, Ireland benefits from British largess in the arena of national security (granted it is in their own interests to defend the island to their immediate west, for obvious reasons) and Ireland would be heavily reliant on British firepower to defend us in the event that we were attacked/invaded.
As its my first post, I am a long term browser of this forum (since 2005). I've noticed quite a few attempts to slur posters who attempt to provide context regarding the invasion as Putin trolls. That's not cool. For the record, the invasion is illegal, immoral, should be resisted and I hope that Putin faces a war crimes tribunal along with Bush, Cheney (sr) and Blair.
= new reply since forum marked as read
