So the core issue, from the Republican perspective, is that the people of West Tyrone are denied representation at the national level in Ireland by a foreign government. Once that representation is achieved the SF representatives will participate in it. (again, not trying to address the merits; just clarify the logic)

The key aspect is that they consider the English government to be a foreign government and so they avoid involving it in the work that they do in Ireland for their Irish constituency. Statements about the illegitimacy of their government historically come from conservative English sources. But the fact is those SF debates in their "protest government" formed the foundation of the modern Irish state. They are a protest vote in the same way that the US Constitutional Convention was.

By the same token, they consider legislating on affairs that pertain to the English, Welsh, and Scots to be none of their business. To take up seats in a foreign parliament would be to meddle in the affairs of a foreign, sovereign nation. And that would be hypocrisy!

This is, at best, very fucking stupid. At worst, it is fairly bigoted and more than a little bit offensive. It is in the same category of Victorian pseudo-science that gave us phrenology and eugenics.

"[Citation needed]" was merely meant as a shorter and much more polite way of implying all of the above. I can be much less polite if that's something you're interested in.

There was no overpopulation problem in Ireland! It was _less_ dense than England, while having similar climate and agricultural capacity. The reason for the famine was that the food that was abundantly produced in Ireland was transferred to England to support their cities (which did have an overpopulation problem). There was more than enough food produced in Ireland to feed everyone in Ireland. That is not what overpopulation looks like.

It's also easy to say no major famines happened in Spain because of her colonies, except that by the time of the famine she had very few remaining. Spanish people had the same capacity to emigrate to the Americas as the Irish did. Your argument was that Irish people were too Catholic to control their population but you haven't addressed the fact that that wasn't a problem in any of the other Catholic countries. The same should be true of Italy, who didn't even have a former empire to call on.

I would guess that the British Army et al. killed at least as many people in India as were burned alive as part of funerary rites. How does one effectively compare those two actions? It's easy to take the coloniser perspective of "they were savages and we stopped them from doing X". But the colonised are telling their own stories "these savages came from across the sea and they committed the most horrible atrocities".

I'm not trying to defend burning people or eating people. But killing people to take their stuff and calling it civilisation is not better. It's certainly not civilised.

However, considering the available governments in Europe at the tail end of the 18th century, I think a time-traveller such as myself would be more interested in spending a few years in France than any of her neighbours. I imagine I would think differently if I came from an aristocratic background!

Even one of the most anglo-friendly and prosperous former colonies, the USA, didn't have very nice things to say about the Empire when they were a part of it.

[Citation needed]

It's hard not to interpret this as just garden variety bigotry, of the same sort that caused the famine in the first place.

Let's assume it's correct, though. The Catholic church had been one of the most powerful organisations in Europe for well over 1000 years by the time if the famine. Why did it take until Ireland in the 19th century for their population mismanagement to become truly problematic? Also why did this not also happen in a country like Spain? Hard to find many more enthusiastically Catholic countries than Spain in that time period.

The population density of Ireland at the time of the famine was comparable to England (it is now much lower). Ireland produced enough food to feed itself and millions of people in English cities at the time of the famine. The issue was not a lack of food but the "ownership" of the food.

The account of capitalism emerging from the black death is a fine theory for continental Europe. At the time of the black death, Irish society was controlled by Irish people. After the 1600s it was increasingly run as a colony, with the indigenous culture outlawed and intensive resource extraction for export to England (timber, food, etc).

You might as well ask why industrialisation didn't take off among the Choctaw or the Cherokee. Or maybe they also just have the wrong religion?

[edit: somebody elsewhere in this comment section has (apparently seriously) proposed Malthusianism as the root cause. In the Year of Our Lord 2025. With all of human knowledge available at their fingertips. You can't keep a bad idea down]

YMMV, though. Some data engineers are writing basic SQL or playing with Azure Data Factory and there isn't too much complexity. Read Designing Data Intensive Applications. If that sort of thing resonates with you then find someone to work with who has experience with those kinds of problems!

[Edit: no disrespect to ADF! Just pointing out that the data engineering discipline is broad and different practitioners will have different expectations of complexity]

Small correction: neither Irish nor the two languages people might refer to as Scottish are Brythonic languages.

Drinkhail! ;-)

This, in itself, isn't a huge obstacle. The problem is the state of healthcare data systems. It's next to impossible to perform high-quality search (even by individuals approved to do so by the IRB). The state of the art in most places is regex searching in SQL.

This is something we have the power to contribute to. Bringing modern search capabilities to important datasets like health (while maintaining HIPAA-conpliance) is a much better use of engineering time than mining spyware data for creepy insights...

[Disclosure: I contributed heavily to one of the major medical search products on the market. We dealt with organisations that expended tens of thousands of dollars and many months per candidate for recruitment. Using some very straightforward IR tech we literally found all their candidates in a few minutes, plus many more. But there is so much more to do!]

As a data point, I have worked a lot of (so-called) blue collar jobs over the years, from stacking shelves to washing pots to serving drinks to digging ditches, and I never had a problem with a bully or a disrespectful boss. I have now been working as a software engineer for 10 years and one of my more recent bosses refused to call me by my name for several months and instead referred to me as "dickhead" or "you Irish bastard" and was known to jab his finger in people's faces and yell "fuck you" when he lost his temper. Assholes are assholes, no matter what your job title.

(but I certainly agree that lower-paid jobs are a lot tougher; even if the wages were the same, I wouldn't go back to any of the jobs I did before software)