Suzanne Harrington: 'Did Ireland and England swap shirts?'

Chatting in Cork this week with someone just moved back after decades overseas, and another on an extended visit after an even longer time abroad, the first words they use to describe the New Ireland are avaricious and litigious.

Which sounds like twin characters from a particularly gruesome pantomime — imagine the Ugly Sisters in gold plated four wheel drives waving writs out the window.

Someone else recounts how a court recently awarded a shopper fifty grand after their new glass jug shattered; also, how €350 silver Nutella jar lids are not only a thing, but people are actually buying them.

They are also buying €130 silver mustard jar lids and €65 silver HP sauce lids — these items really exist. It’s not fake news. I checked.

However, as an Irish person resident in the UK, avaricious and litigious sounds lovely compared with fascist and delusional. Obviously you’d be in need of fairly urgent psychiatric intervention if you regard silver lids for your condiment jars as a valid use of your resources, but at least you aren’t in a bedsit in Sunderland on a zero hours contract voting for Boris Johnson because you think he will make your life better.

You might be avaricious and litigious,but you’re not completely mental.

Let us hope then that getting Brexit done by selling the NHS to the orange testicle in the White House will be worth it, especially when genetic mutations from all the chlorinated chicken kick in, and people are bartering their children’s kidneys in exchange for antibiotics.

Which kind of brings us to turkeys. Tis the season not only when English turkeys seem to have voted decisively for Christmas, but when their Irish counterparts will meet a less voluntary although equally unfortunate end. A billboard by the train station in Cork, from Go Vegan World, vividly reminds us of this.

Next to the save-the-turkeys advert are two more billboards, advertising rival 0.0% alcohol lagers. And opposite that, graffiti sprayed on a railway bridge: No Racists! Failte Roimh Chach!

What’s happening? Have Ireland and England swapped shirts when nobody was looking? Changed teams? It’s quite hallucinatory. Old Ireland, always so reliably meaty, boozy, and racist, and Old England, a bit more tea-drinking and multicultural. Not anymore.

New Ireland, while perhaps needing to rethink its methods of ad hoc wealth redistribution so that people stop feigning PTSD every time they trip over a chalk line, is now clearly the more progressive island, as our neighbours continue to commit fiscal, social and geographical hara kiri in mortifying slow motion.

Continue their public nervous breakdown, as we watch between the slits of our fingers, wincing. And trying not to laugh too loud.

Spare a thought then, for the exiles of Old Ireland now living in scary New England, and wondering WTF has happened. As New Ireland broadens its stride, marching confidently with the rest of Europe, clutching its silver Nutella jar lids, we exiles watch our adopted country slide towards chaos. And not good chaos either. Happy Brexmas.