I thought the exact same thing- "The Ireland Event" being the Catholic-Protestant conflict in the latter part of the 20th century

Really quck edit: this is probably the most controversial comment that I have posted here. However, without a proper survey I am still not convinced that someone will associate "the Irish problem" with the violence there. Take the discussion below with a grain of salt and I hope that you, assuming that you are in the west coast or Atlantic coast, consider if someone (a random person) in the Midwest will know this.

To be fair unless you're somehow intune with Europe at that time an average American will not really know how really bad it is (they might have an idea that something bad is happening - but they might described it as mostly targeted attacks to leaders, not knowing about the civilian killings).

I'm not especially "intune with Europe", and that conflict ended when I was a small child, but I knew the violence extended to civilians. Not sure why you assume people wouldn't know that.

I'm referring to the average American populace and not to the average HN poster. For example, I knew the details of the Tokyo Sarin Gas attacks and know that it was caused by a "new religion" cult but an average person outside Japan wouldn't really remember that as clearly as I am (unless you are somehow in Western Australia since a farm area there was refurbished to produce sarin). It is like 9/11 outside America: an average person knows it enough to remember whatever inconvenience they encountered that day but not the whole details.

Sunday Bloody Sunday is a well known song, don't forget. It wasn't that long ago that the IRA was putting bombs in trash cans. I think this is far more known in the US than you'd think, especially given it's intra-Christian violence.

If a person has watched Derry Girls on Netflix they know about as much as I do

Surely the bombs in London and Manchester were international news at the time, at least throughout the Western world?

Next you'll tell me the average American is unaware of the 7 July bombs on the London Underground, the ETA bombs in Spain, Breivik in Norway or the sarin gas attacks in Tokyo.

The average American will have probably seen some coverage of those things, but for stuff that happened years ago that aren't closely tied to ongoing, present-day in-the-US issues, they won't recall many details.

Even "world news" segments in the American news largely involve America in some capacity. Maybe half of world news in the US is completely unrelated to the US.

That's part of why I read the BBC for world news.

I would guess that the average American (I really mean average here, not average among HN posters) will have heard of nothing on that list, but also not heard of any US political violence in that time period.

This. The HN crowd vastly overestimates how unknown these can be on an actual person. Even when they knew about the explosions in the (London) Docklands and in Manchester, they would only knew it to be terrorist attacks, not specifically the provisional Irish Republican Army (unrelated to the Irish Army).

Edit: definitely not the Australian city of Docklands (and not any city named Manchester ouside England!)

I think the [Provisional] IRA is well known in America. Every other American seems to think they are 'part Irish' and I think the average American's awareness of The Troubles is high, at least compared to other foreign conflicts (at least for Americans old enough to remember the 90s at least anyway.) Furthermore 'Irish car bombs' are a tactless but popular bar drink in America, which indicates an awareness of the conflict.

If you think giving a drink a tasteless name is bad, the reality is a lot worse.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/0...

Through the 70’s and 80’s much of the money and many of the guns came directly from the US.

Thatcher, Reagan and to some extent Tom Clancy ended that.

My father has a story about being in Irish bars in New Jersey in the 70s and 80s when Irish men would occasionally come into bars and announce they were collecting the 'Irish tax'. People would chip in a dollar or two, with the understanding that the money would be used to support the IRA in some way.

> Furthermore 'Irish car bombs' are a tactless but popular bar drink in America, which indicates an awareness of the conflict.

In the Atlantic parts, sure. But someone saying that others knows the history of Ireland because they knew a drink is a stretch at this point.

Occasionally I've met people who wondered where the drink name came from, but everybody else in the room was always quick to explain it. Americans may not know all the nuance and details, but the basics ('there was a violent conflict between the British and Irish, particularly regarding Northern Ireland") really are widely known in my experience.

Now, I know all of these events though clearly though, but I'm referring to the average populace. Yes, they might know that happened and they might be inconvenienced by it but not enough to know that (for example) the sarin attack was due to a "new religion" cult. It is like 9/11 outside America: an average person knows it enough to remember whatever inconvenience they encountered that day but not the whole details.

I am a very average American, born in 1983, and I’ll admit that I have only the vaguest idea of The Troubles. My first real concrete memory of hearing of Ireland’s issues was the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

If you were born after 1990 in America, I am doubtful you have much knowledge of that era at all.

Probably that Jack Ryan movie with Harrison Ford was most people’s exposure of that era

I was hoping it involved Guinness myself, or better yet Smithwick's. I'd be okay with multiple events like that.

I love your humour during these times, also thought by "Ireland Event" he was talking about "The Troubles" coming to America and clicked but I guess we have different stereotypical images of Irish folks.

I thought it was about potatoes

Me too. I had images of famine and millions of Americans fleeing the country to find a better life overseas.

What?

Potatoes, a new world food, were a monoculture in Ireland at the time. These days there are a huge number of potato varieties grown, so a devastating potato blight seems unlikely to occur again.

The Russet Burbank potato is 70% of the US market. A blight of this cultivar would be devastating.

How devastating? I expect few if any would starve; we grow more than enough grain to keep people alive. Potatoes farmers would be put in a hard financial situation, but they'd probably get bailed out and could replant with other varieties for the next season.

I don't think the bar is as low as "could the government make enough gruel to keep you from starving." And, given the current experience with vaccine distribution, even that is not certain.

Think of all commercial food products that contain potatoes that could no longer be produced for a time. Potatoes are a significant source of cattle feed. Potato starch has many non-food industrial applications.

Perhaps we wouldn't have millions of deaths, but a year without potatoes would be an historic catastrophe that Americans would remember for decades.

> Perhaps we wouldn't have millions of deaths, but a year without potatoes would be an historic catastrophe that Americans would remember for decades.

Much better than a historic catastrophe from which Ireland never repopulated.

We euphemistically call that "The Troubles".

I was just thinking about a comment about how the current situation could lead to a US "Troubles"

And I assumed it would be about the coronavirus, because the neurons that knew about the virus surge on the island answered first. And the framing of the event on "2 months" made me think of current events rather than distant past ones.

Context is the hard problem in NLP, I guess.

I initially thought the same, in part because I recall a HN comment yesterday predicting the US would see such events soon, comparing them to the troubles.

To be fair, even Amazon's support team (or robot) have done a similar mistake last November (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/nov/15/amazon-re...).

Same here. And it's a sign of the times that I felt relief that it was "just" about covid...

Huh. I guessed “potato famine”

Same. Also a bizarre example of someone coming up with a better analogy than I've been able to muster about my own expectations, when in fact they did nothing of the sort.