What the British don’t understand about America and Ireland

2011 Cleveland St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Photo: DonkeyHotey/Flickr (used under a creative commons license)

“What do you call this?” the historian Tim Carey asked his followers in a tweet posted on Friday along with a photo taken of the islands of Great Britain, Ireland, and Mann. A loaded question if there ever was one, it was not lost on me that I saw the tweet on 23 October — which was the 20th anniversary of the IRA beginning the decommissioning its weapons and, with that act, saving the…