The article has been removed from the website, and the author has offered an (oddly-non committal) apology, but plenty of people who've read it, believe that the online publication Country Squire magazine's opinion piece published last Thursday and titled, "Get Stuffed, Éire" is offensive and racist. Among those is journalist Ken Murray, who spoke to Joe Duffy on Monday's Liveline. He told Joe how, after reading the article he posted on his Facebook page that he was going to make a complaint to the London Metropolitan Police.
Country Squire was set up in August last year and it's no surprise to discover that the publication is pro-Brexit. Its editor sent a statement to Liveline, but wouldn't come on the programme. Liveline got an actor to read an extract from the piece – written by Jim Browne – which you can hear by pressing play, above. The article has factual inaccuracies like this:
"Britain is far and away Ireland's biggest trading partner, accounting for 50% of exports from the Republic." (Actually, Britain is Ireland's third-largest trading partner, after the US and Belgium.)
Then it has charming gems like this:
"The southern Irish, just like their northern friends, Sinn Féin, can be trusted about as far as one can throw them."
And this:
"If Britain wants to, it can run Éire into the ground, where there are no consolations. Its spotty youths will brain drain again to the US and Britain and its economy will crumble."
That's the tone of the piece: belligerent, condescending, ill-informed. But is it racist? Jim Murray compared it to the infamous Punch magazine depictions of Irish people in the 1880s, saying that the tone of the Country Squire piece suggests that the Irish are dumb, uneducated, always drunk, always looking for a fight and that Ireland without Britain is going nowhere.
"To me, this is racism at its worst."
You can hear more opinions on the Country Squire piece and listen back to the rest of Liveline here.