Megan Nolan

… After calling the women “scroungers” and demanding to know whether they had jobs, one of the men took the decapitated head of a pigeon out of his pocket and threw it at them.

That particular fact won’t make any more sense the longer you look at it, and yet it goes on being true. I watched the video footage over and over, looked at earnest news headlines that simply read, “The footage shows a man verbally abusing protesters, before the head of a decapitated pigeon is thrown,” but no explanation was forthcoming. Why did the man throw a pigeon head at the protesters? More important, why was he carrying one in his pocket, ready, seemingly, to be launched as soon as a worthy adversary appeared?

But stranger still — or perhaps, upon reflection, not strange at all — was the gap between the English and the Irish when it came to interpreting the Pigeon Incident. … sensitive Britons were eager to ask why it mattered that the men were English. They’re just louts, they said. Why does it matter where they’re from? After all, all that occupation business was so long ago.

… The secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Karen Bradley, recently admitted with startling candor that she didn’t know basic facts about the politics of the region where she is in charge: that nationalists — those who seek a united Ireland — won’t vote for unionist parties, and vice versa. … I found myself genuinely breathless with anger when I read the Conservative M.P. Andrew Bridgen’s recent comments assuming he would be entitled to an Irish passport post-Brexit.

—Megan Nolan, New York Times[^1]