State visit to Britain - History’s chains can be broken

It is a measure of the great progress made in Anglo-Irish relations that someone born in 1981, the year our national, 32-county treasure Paul Brady released ‘Nothing But the Same Old Story’ might not recognise the song’s powerful back story.
Brady’s commentary on the lack of opportunity in 1980s Ireland, on emigration, and the difficult life of an emigrant in a country under attack by terrorists from their place of birth, might still resonate on an economic level but the evil darkness behind it, the terrorists in the shadows waiting to bomb and murder, and the terrible difficulties their crimes created for millions of people of Irish ancestry building lives in Britain are thankfully a memory, even if a relatively recent and raw one.