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When we think of anarchy, we imagine rioters in the streets, looting, setting fires, and spraying the neighborhood with bullets; Chicago on steroids, beneath the law. When we think of tyranny, we imagine the tyrant: the autocrat above the law, whose diktat is law, and who keeps order below, as would Machiavelli’s ambitious, cold-eyed, Italy-uniting Prince. That we could have both at once seems inconceivable, but so it is, said Francis, in America. Our betters not only break the law with impunity, they make the law outside of the legislature with impunity, either by judicial imagination or by the caprice of the bureaucrat. Then they apply it to whom they will, how they will, and when they will. When statutory law is a jungle of regulations whose smallest feature no man alive can master, when law is ever at you, crawling up your leg, catching in your hair, glaring at you from the thicket, it is as if there were no law at all; and you are subject to your masters, who hold
BBC News
By John Murphy
image captionLondon s Spitalfields, where Irish labourers were accused of under-cutting English men
Ever since the word Brexit was first coined in 2012, issues of migration, integration and independence have dominated public debate across the UK and Ireland.
Now we have reached the centenary year of the partition of Ireland, BBC journalist Fergal Keane has looked back at the profound influence, over many centuries, of the Irish in Britain in a new BBC Radio 4 podcast.
How the Irish Shaped Britain tells a story of contradictory narratives existing in parallel.
In Scotland, historian Professor Tom Devine explains that the digging and construction by Irish navvies and their successors through the 19th and 20th centuries helped to shape the Scotland we know today.
Sir - In her article last week, Senator Frances Black demands a referendum on Irish unity in accordance with the requirements of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 - but fails to address its possible consequences.
As I understand it, that agreement recognised the complexities of conflicting nationalist and unionist loyalties and rights in Northern Ireland and replaced the unionist majority abuse of the nationalist minority with a power-sharing arrangement - because that majority abuse had led to an unsuccessful 25 years of revolt that cost 3,500 lives.
In other words, a simplistic, rigid interpretation of democracy (that a majority can do whatever it wishes, regardless of the minority) was replaced with a more flexible interpretation.
in the first words of this couplet:
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay
A poignant sentiment but let me acknowledge that I’m not a big Goldsmith fan. My own preferences in verse run more toward Merle Haggard, whose country music hits include the following lyric from his 1982 song “Are the Good Times Really Over?”:
Is the best of the free life behind us now
And are the good times really over for good?
I wonder, though: Is it possible that the insights of an eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish novelist-poet and a twentieth-century American singer-songwriter, each reflecting on a common theme of decadence and each served up with a dollop of nostalgia, just might intersect?