Wednesday, June 23, 2004

Bush in Ireland

In the NY Times this morning, Nuala O'Faolain does a good job of summing up all the reasons why Irish people will not be welcoming President Bush here this weekend. I don't agree with most of these positions, but that doesn't mean she hasn't captured the mood.

One thing that did strike me, however, was this sentence, "Our intelligentsia is pro-American". This is definitely not true. Irish intelligentsia is a mixture of smoked salmon Marxist and old world snobbery. The average Irish person is generally pro-American, but not the intellectual elite.