Showbiz baby…
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and President of the European Council Donald Tusk hit the headlines this week following a speech in the European Union on Wednesday.
Tusk stated in the speech: “I’ve been wondering what that special place in hell looks like, for those who promoted Brexit, without even a sketch of a plan how to carry it out safely.”
Tusk then doubled down on the harsh words by tweeting them out minutes after the press conference ended.
Later footage emerged in which Varadkar can be heard saying: “They’ll give you terrible trouble in the British press for that”.
Speaking on an upcoming episode of Ireland Unfiltered with Dion Fanning, which is due to be released on Tuesday next Tuesday, Eamon Dunphy stated his disapproval for the comments from Tusk and Varadkar and argued that such commentary is promoting anglophobia.
You can read what he had to say below.
Dion Fanning: There’s been a suggestion about the Brexit process and bringing out a new strain of anglophobia in Ireland. Your life story, if you read your book ‘The Rocky Road’, it is almost a story about your cultural affinity with England and how that separated you and people like you in Ireland from ‘Official Ireland.’ Do you think it is on the rise again, that anglophobia?
Eamon Dunphy: I think it’s being played to. We had an incident just yesterday where Donald Tusk made a particularly cutting comment about the Brexiteers and our own Taoiseach Leo Varadkar was standing beside him and he sneeringly said afterwards ‘The British press will get you tomorrow for that’.
Now that’s all and good, but there has been a sense of Varadkar and the present government playing to the ‘Green Gallery.’ Yes, the Brexiteers are a pretty repellant lot, some of them, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson and others in that wing of the Tory party are not particularly nice people … but to imagine that they’re representative of England or English people is a mistake.
So hating England I regard as foolish, stupid, futile. Hating anybody is stupid and futile. But I think the sentiment now that has arisen because of Brexit, I don’t think Irish people are comfortable with it.
Ireland Unfiltered, brought to you in partnership with Carlsberg Unfiltered, will be available everywhere you get your podcasts and on YouTube every Tuesday.
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