Spiteful bigot - “The Irish have contributed nOtHiNg to Civilisation”? Reality: - The space between written words - The modern submarine - The Boycott - Halloween - Inspiration for the breakup of the British Empire - Boyles Law, modern chemistry - Traditional Irish music & dance - Irish monastic European network ⬇️ - Polar exploration, Shackleton & Crean - The worlds most beautiful book ⬇️ - Extraordinary craft & metalwork ⬇️ - Hamiltonian mechanics, fundamental to modern physics - Europes oldest humanitarian law protecting women & children, ‘law of the innocents’, 698AD - Hollow hypodermic needle - Pulsar discovery - An incalculable diaspora contribution to America, Britain, Australia and others - One of Europe’s earliest extensive Law traditions, Brehon Laws - The parole system - UNESCO recognised National Folklore Collection - Europe’s largest and most important concentration of prehistoric megalithic art - Newgrange, 1000 years older than pyramids and Stonehenge - Roy Keane - Kelvin absolute temperature scale - Duty free - Insular manuscript illumination - Beaufort wind scale - Irish whiskey - Worlds oldest continuously played field sport, hurling - Three point tractor - First Western country to impose a total ban on apartheid South African goods/imports - Tayto - Four Nobel Prizes in Literature: Yeats, Shaw, Beckett & Heaney - Modern satire, Gullivers travels - Swift, Goldsmith, Edgeworth, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, George Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, James Joyce, Seán O’Casey, Samuel Beckett, Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Behan, Frank O’Connor, Seamus Heaney, John Banville, Roddy Doyle, Colm Tóibín, Marian Keyes, Claire Keegan, Sally Rooney, Paul Lynch, Donal Ryan… - Ulysses, Gulliver’s Travels, Dracula, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Earnest, Dracula, The Playboy of the Western World, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Finnegans Wake, Dancing at Lughnasa, Angela’s ashes, Brooklyn, Room, Milkman, Small Things Like These, Foster, Normal People, Prophet Song… Jack B. Yeats, Paul Henry, Mainie Jellett, Louis le Brocquy, William Orpen, John Lavery… Don’t get me started on modern contribution to the arts & culture with great actors, singers, bands and sportspersons ⬇️ Not bad for an island beaten and staved, restricted in education and opportunity - and we are only getting started ☘️🪉🟢🌀🇮🇪