Might speak English as our language was suppressed for centuries but doesn't mean our cultural identity is the same as England. Trying to say Irish culture is the same as English because we were forced into speaking the same language is quite offensive and shows you do not understand Irish people and our culture
Pretty much, I love my English Sister in Law, but there's no question there's cultural gaps between us. Not a bad thing, just different.
That seems a bit too much for me. A thousand years is a long time. A long, long time. And we see in other parts of the world, or even just Europe, cultural changes that were as large or larger over the same period of time. It's certainly not out of the realm of possibility that you could come up with a 1066 PoD that leads to Ireland getting integrated into England at a very early date and thoroughly Anglicized before the modern era. It might not be likely, or it might be difficult, but it's not unimaginable. You have an awful lot of time to work with.
Both in Sweden and in France there are ethnic groups, who don't self identify as standard French, primarily the Bretons, the Basques and the Corse, or standard Swedish, the Sami people.
I agree it might not an unimaginable possibility, but you'd need rather a lot of imagination and really, really deep data to be able to justice to such a scenario. I merely offer what I feel is the path of lesser resistance, at the latest possible date where it's feasible.
You go to Brittany and ask most people what their national identity is, they would say French.
The cultural identity is certainly different, but I'm not sure the actual culture is. The food and drink is highly similar, the traditional music is similar and the ways people live their lives - once you account for the fact Ireland is a more rural place - are pretty similar. Certainly they are more similar than they are to say, French or Swedish or Greek culture, let along compared to places further afield.
The idea of a common Celticness is a Victorian idea arising out of linguistics not a common ethnicity. The ancient Britons did not see themselves as brothers to the Gaels or the Picts. I recall there was considered some commonality with the Gauls though so you might get agreement as that as being Celtic but then Celt was a GrecoRoman word so it might just come to mean Romanised Gaul or Briton and thus even further from commonality with the Gaels.
Caesar, IIRC, said that the southern Britons were similar to the northern Gauls, and there were some British tribes with the same name as Gallic tribes (e.g., you get Parisii in modern East Yorkshire and the Seine valley -- the latter group, of course, giving their name to Paris), which might suggest some cross-migration. But it's not clear that the actual Gauls or Britons thought of themselves as the same, or even similar, people, and since Gaul was Romanised to a much greater degree than Britain such similarities would tend to become less over time.
Given that catholic emancipation a full century before WW1 didn't do it, why would the act of union do it? Too many people think that national feeling is only about some objective measurement of how well people treat each other when in fact it's far more than that.
With the butterflying-away of the Anglo-Saxon invasion, Romanization in Britain can continue and, later, spread to Ireland as well, assuming that a state based in southeastern Britain remains the regional hegemon, which seems likely for demographic reasons. That doesn't mean that the eventual Romance peoples of the British Isles won't, over time, come to see themselves as separate nations, but it certainly wouldn't hurt.
NO. I reland is the hardest part to make a part of the British isles as one nation.
