Red vs. Blue in Ireland

In an earlier post, I questioned how Connaught could appear so prosperous, despite the seeming lack of industry outside of tourism.

When I was on murder mile yesterday (so called because it was where the poorest Catholic and Protestant communities abut each other, resulting in Ulster's highest murder rate), I noted that the housing stock actually looked quite good. How could these brick townhouses represent the poorest section of Belfast? I mean, I've been to Camden and sections of Philly that looked like Calcutta.

In both cases, the north and south of Ireland, money has poured in from Great Britain, the European Union, the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. When the south joined the E.U., it was the poor man of Europe and received massive funding for highway construction and other infrastructure improvements. As various commissions studied the troubles in the north, they recommended large investment to improve housing stock, establish community and culture centers and festivals, there's the famous peace bridge in Derry, and so on. The remit of Great Britain to the north is now somewhere near $20 billion per year.

If you are familiar with the red state/blue state discussion around transfer of subsidies (from blue to red), this made me feel uncomfortable. I'd like to see Ulster and the south on their own feet, living off the product of their own effort, not off taxpayers in other lands.

Then I cheered myself up by deciding that England robbed Ireland for hundreds of years of rent on confiscated lands, corn, meat, oak trees, and people, resulting in 20% of the population leaving in the wake of famine. If that is coming full circle now, so be it. As for the other countries, they all benefited from waves of Irish immigrants who built canals, train tracks, houses--whatever needed building. Their descendants are sending back funds the way any good immigrants do (ask any Guatemalan in the U.S. or Filipina in the middle east).

It isn't that simple, of course. I do worry about spending a large sum of money buying a house in an economy dependent on outside support that can be withdrawn at any time. At the end of the day, I have a lot of faith in both of Ulster's tribes and I believe they could find their way to self sufficiency if forced to--not without pain of course.
8/29