Surprise!

Northern Ireland has joyously discovered racism, seemingly embraced by "Loyalists", who have links with white supremacist groups on the mainland. I shouldn't be surprised, but I am.

I shouldn't be surprised because in N.I. we're dealing with people who wear the colours of the Israelis ("Loyalist" morons) or the Palestinians ("Republican" morons) just in case it proves difficult to start a fight any other way.

I shouldn't be surprised because during last week (as in many other weeks) a fire-engine putting out a house fire was attacked by a mob of stone-throwing monkeys.

And I shouldn't be surprised because as a primitive piece of social engineering, encouraging the migration of a bunch of murderous Scottish psychopaths to a cold and unpleasant island already populated by tree-dwelling cannibals was always going to be a tricky one to pull off. (I know that was a long time ago, but let's not forget the old joke: "You are about to land in Northern Ireland. Please put your watches back four hundred years.")

I'm just surprised because it seemed to me that there was still a lot of mileage to be had in the traditional kind of bigoted idiocy. Attacking and killing people because they have different political aspirations is what N.I.'s always been about, not looking for brown people to beat up. Let's face it, the only two things N.I. ever had going for it were low house prices and no racism, so now there's absolutely no point to the place. That's what really pisses me off. They should be greatful that anyone of any ethnic background other than pure bogtrotter wants to come anywhere near the ghastly place. The weather's lousy, the people are grey and miserable, the economy's built on sand, and if it wasn't for £4 billion a year in government subsidies they'd all have eaten each other by now. With Easyjet flights out of Belfast as cheap as they are I'm surprised the sodden hell-hole isn't empty.

I had this faint hope that as the piggy-eyed, potato-faced denizens of the place struggled to shift their social and political thinking from the 1600s to the twenty-first century, they might set their sights a little higher up the evolutionary ladder than 1920s Mississippi.

Fat fucking chance.