Continuing the discussion from Things that annoy you about Ireland:
[quote=“Fagan_ODowd, post:92, topic:21733, full:true”].
Not much really. It’s a beautiful country with a temperate climate. It’s a safe place to live - very little in the way of crime or dangerous wildlife. We have a functioning democracy, reasonable infrastructure, abundant food and modest unemployment. We have a free press, a strong judiciary and a working constitution. Imprisonment without trial is a rarity, torture is unheard of and no secret police force (that I am aware of). Corruption is minimal. Pollution is virtually non existent by international norms. We have a generous and tolerant population. We have a rich and varied indigenous cultural heritage. We managed to free ourselves from foreign oppression and then had the wit to avoid getting involved in the carnage of World War 2.
I would say that Ireland comfortably sits within the best 10 countries in the world to live and we have little enough to be annoyed about.
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Isn’t that just a lovely sentiment from Fagan?
I do concur that we’re hard on ourselves. Like, I get really frustrated by our politicians and how we vote, but even on politics we can be grateful that:
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We have no extreme right party with any sort of support. This is despite 13.1% of our population being born outside the State. The UK has a horrible problem with intolerance and anti-immigration violence and rhetoric and they have less than 12% born outside the country. It has taken us a long time to be a pluralist country, and we do have far more racism than I’d like to see, and we have too much inequality, but compare ourselves to other countries with a relatively sudden increase in immigration and I think we can be quite happy.
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Even FG are nowhere near as preachy, intolerant or arrogant as the Tories.