Perhaps people here who are Scottish or Welsh have grown up feeling the same, but being from NI, it’s certainly always been clear to me that the place has been an embarrassment and annoyance to successive UK national governments. It’s impossible to avoid the feeling of being second-class citizens when travelling on ‘the mainland’ – or when ordering goods online that are supposedly delivered ‘anywhere in the UK’ (Shetland et al.) only to find that that means ‘except NI’. National newspaper deals too – ‘free Sherlock Holmes books with this voucher (except in NI)’ etc. Oh, and we have a load of local banks that are somehow allowed to issue their own bespoke “sterling” notes… except that nobody ‘on the mainland’ accepts the bloody things. It might as well be toy money.

In short, I have for my entire lifetime been embarrassed by Northern Ireland and felt second-class when among people in England/Scotland – embarrassed because its most prominent public figures are a shower of bigots or terrorist apologists (DUP & Sinn Fein), because its biggest claim to fame is a boat that didn’t work (Titanic) and that now, unfathomably, drives tourism here, and because its currency is useless elsewhere » Continue Reading.