I understand that, but while you were being subjugated by the English establishment, so was the common Englishman. We had our land taken. Our people were left to starve during poor harvests (though not on the scale of Ireland) and latterly sent to workhouses where they died from disease or overwork. We couldn’t vote. We had no power to change the system, and revolts ended badly (Peterloo massacre, etc). We were working 16 hour days and dying of cholera and TB.
People ask why the English are obsessed with class without understanding where it stems from. Why do the working class have so little respect for the upper classes? Why do the upper classes still treat us as scum? You only need look at our history to understand why.
The Irish have far more in common with the average Englishman than they’d like to believe. The “English” that you should hate are actually the English elites. The English that you do hate, in my area, are descendants of Ireland.
My working-class Grandad taught me all about the Irish famine, the Bengali famine, the slave trade and colonialism, the awful treatment of the Gurkhas by the British army, the Tonypandy riots, etc etc etc. We are absolutely not all uneducated.
Yes, it should absolutely be taught in schools and the syllabus is definitely moving from the ‘Glorious Empire’ that was taught in my grandparents’ day to a more honest, anti-colonial stance.
So yes, it’s frustrating to be roundly hated by the Irish when we weren’t to blame and when our great-great grandparents actually came to Britain in the 1840s to escape the famine.