Author: Judi Sutherland

I’m guessing Amazon will be thinking hard about starting up an Irish website and sourcing products from places other than the UK. We heard rumours in late December that they have been searching for warehouse space in Dublin. In the meantime, we’ve been advised that the best thing to do is to open an account with Amazon.de, which has an English language option. There is of course no reason why a product made in China for a Dutch company should have to go anywhere near the UK, but like so many companies that have hitherto treated the UK and Ireland as a single entity for trade purposes, Amazon seems not to have thought this through – yet.

In these northern latitudes, the light is sparse and winter bares its white and weathered fist against the fastnesses of night. We decorate the darkness, cannot stand its plain finality. Daub it with tinsel dress it in baubles, switch on season’s greetings in the streets. Perhaps God is dead; perhaps the shortest day will dwindle […]

Here in Ireland we had a longer autumn lockdown than you’ve suffered in the UK, including a 5km travel restriction from mid-October to December 1st, and even now, a request to stay within our county. In our case, that would allow us to sample the delights of Dublin City, but we have restrained ourselves, having no wish to actually go looking for the virus, like the famous shellfish vendor; “She died of a fever, and no-one could save her, and that was the end of poor Molly Malone”.

I don’t feel responsible for what happened long before I was born. At the time of the Great Hunger, my ancestors were living lives of rural poverty as farm labourers in Scotland and England. None of them would have been able to vote for the British government that despised the Catholic Irish and conspired to keep them in poverty. I don’t feel responsible, but as an Englishwoman in Ireland, I have to be sensitive to the difficult history of our two countries. As last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests indicated, we Brits have a lot to learn about our country’s history of colonial rule.

At night, when the last train rumbles to the depot and the piston-draught dies down, the night shift keeps its silent hours; cleaning, repairing, watching CCTV screens of empty platforms, shutting down electrics with a key; trackwalking near Stockwell, where an engineer holds a Tilly lamp – he died in 1950 – and cowled monks […]

“Parkinson’s Law –
“Work expands so as to fill the time available to complete it.”
CN Parkinson, 1955

I think everything has changed. The smashed fragments are still in the air, so we’ll have to see what happens when or if things settle. What will the new ‘normal’ look like? Search me. I know I’ve had to get used to reading to my own face on a screen at Zoom events, which is weird!

Ireland, although about one-fifteenth the size of the UK, is facing many of the same challenges. So it might be interesting to look at the different reactions and consequences of some recent events in Ireland, remembering the aftermath of similar events in the UK.

We didn’t set out to become Brefugees. What happened to us may well become more and more common as the UK’s Brexit recession sets in.