brian lee

Following his recent vist to Ireland for a debate, Derek Clark said "You see the Euro ring of stars quite a lot in Ireland”. You certainly do, but the Irish attitude to the EU was always, lets get as much as we can whilst we can.

I thought you might like to know that strangely enough the EU flag was designed in Ireland by a friend of mine, now deceased.

As Chief Herald of Ireland in the mid fifties, Gerard Slevin, born in Cork, was asked to design a symbol for the Council of Europe. This was later adopted by the EU. The stars did not represent the number of nations but the face of a clock, expressing the hope that in time, Europe would move in perfect harmony.

Although for a time I lived a few doors from him in South County Dublin and dined with him and his family several times, it was not until he died that I learned of this in his obituary in the Telegraph. He also designed a coat of arms for President Kennedy.

We never discussed his work, we had local problems to deal with. I remember one of his cracks about going into the local butcher's for a pound of mince and having to wait while the head of one of a local traveller's family was served with the best fillet steak.

He was a man of scholarsip, not a political animal, but would have seen the funny side of there being such an organisation as UKIP. However, I don't suppose he would have bettered the current UKIP logo.

Britannist

A most interesting posting.

I can report that anti-EU feeling in the Ireland (both the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland/UK) is going to go in only one direction - UP.

There is already one member of the EU 'Parliament' from the Irish Republic who sits in the Independence and Democracy group (of which UKIP is the largest single part) and more and more Irish people (in the Irish Republic's capital) are becoming aware that apart from a few token EU-funded projects Dublin (like cities in the UK) is a net loser from the EU (most of the EU money to Ireland goes to rural farmers in the Irish Republic).

Many decent Roman Catholic folk in Ireland are tiring of the increasingly atheistic and anti-Christian slant of EU decision-making and the obviously atheistic and anti-religious text of the EU Constitution.