This is no love story

When England met Ireland is a tale of colonialism, not romance. Centuries of styling England’s relationship to Ireland as a kind of love story papers over the true brutality of colonisation. Alison Garden, a literary critic and cultural historian, explores how the strange entanglements of politics and romantic love marked England’s conquest of Ireland and still haunt the Irish today. “There’s so much about the relationship between Ireland and Britain that sounds like a bad romance, including gaslighting the people in the North about their experiences during the Troubles. But using the love story to make sense of the past has a sinister history. I’m not saying these stories are perfect – and why we keep returning to this narrative needs to be probed – yet there is some serious meat to them that academics have tended to overlook because they are love stories.”