Almost a decade ago the Irish academic Liam Kennedy published a tremendous book with the title Unhappy the Land: the Most Oppressed People Ever, the Irish? It is a dissection of one of the most curious pathologies in the world: the desire to have been oppressed; a glorying in being repressed.

Kennedy, like a few other brave writers (Ruth Dudley Edwards, Malachi O’Doherty, Kevin Myers) has the courage to point to an under-examined seam in Ireland’s history. Specifically he takes aim at the mawkishness that exists in contemporary Irish affairs. The desire to be the first victim, perhaps the greatest victim, of all victims, anywhere in the world.

You see similar strains of aspiring victimhood in other mini-nationalisms. Over recent years, Scots and Welsh Nats have all sought to join in the victimhood jamboree. Some years ago I heard a Welsh poetess speaking to a very international and diverse audience. She made her opening plea, or boast, by saying that everyone should remember that the Welsh were the ‘first victims’ of colonisation – a point which can only be responded to by some combination of a yelp and a yawn.

But nobody ever beat the Irish in the victimhood Olympics. Whatever era in their history they want to look at, they can always find a narrative of suffering. Sometimes it has some justification, as with the famine of the 1800s. At other times, as with the Easter Rising and the IRA, the story is sugar-coated to turn people’s attention away from the fact that Irish history has been dominated by an unusual percentage of........

© The Spectator