John Waters: Count night for a UK election, I find, is a slightly surreal experience to observe as an Irishman in Ireland.
What is this place upon which we eavesdrop with such ease, interest and pretend indifference? Isn't this just another election in a foreign country, at which we have voyeur access by accident of geographical proximity or what we sometimes call our "shared" history?
But then again, if this is what it is, why do the British not watch our elections with the same sleepless fascination?
There is always something profoundly affecting about the drama, moment and strange intimacy of a British election. Rarely do the ambivalences of our "next-doors" relationship become so crystallised as when we watch them choosing a government. It is one of the rare moments when we admit to ourselves, without pain, that Britain remains, in a certain sense, our political fatherland, and that the wash of events there will affect us profoundly.
Irish politics will carry the marks of such as Thatcher and Blair long after their departure. Apart from the obvious, remember that, without Thatcher, Michael McDowell would be a modest barrister, if such can be imagined, rather than an icon of centre-right fundamentalism.
Most of the time, we sustain the part-fiction of separateness. Though we spend much time watching British television and reading British newspapers, we treat this as the serendipitous cultural bounty of an accident of geography, or perhaps driftwood from the shipwreck of erstwhile domination.
What's theirs is ours (though deniably so) and what's ours is our own. It's not just that we both love and hate England (the entity we think about really), but that we have two complete, parallel and contradictory sets of attitudes and responses to her, which operate at every conceivable level. Most of us grew up drawing on English culture for our intellectual nurture: from Shakespeare to John Peel, from Enid Blyton to The Observer, from Desperate Dan to Robin Day. This cultural intimacy tracked also a physical one, born of the need that once drew our people to the heart of the empire.
And yet, in tandem with all this, we had what is disparagingly referred to as "the Christian Brothers version" of history, which demanded that we be at once hostile, suspicious and indifferent towards those things that nourished us. Some of us made clear choices, as though responding to the character in the Paul Durcan poem who demands that we take one side or the other or be "nothing but a f**king romantic", which long dogged a political discourse requiring either uncritical adoption of national victimology or a repudiation of the facts. Most of us carried both outlooks within ourselves, embracing the richness that England offered while, in a certain other sense, rejecting her with extreme prejudice. We saw nothing strange in singing rebel songs en route to Old Trafford.
It is as though each response, victim and revisionist, exists in a separate compartment of the Irish brain, with a third, the paradox compartment, working around the clock to enable us to live with the contradictions.
An odd side-effect of colonialism was its suppression in the Irish mind of an organic capacity to believe opposing things at once. England demanded that we be rational, even if the result was rational hatred of her.
Things are changing fast. The Blair years have witnessed a dramatic modification of Irish responses to British political figures. Our attitudes to Margaret Thatcher were coloured by the green tinge of a still-septic history, and so were quite different from the response to her of even the most hostile among her fellows.
But the responses to Tony Blair in Ballsbridge or Ballina are indistinguishable from those he provokes in Hackney or Primrose Hill. We are gradually being reabsorbed into the cultural commonwealth. This process of change is naturally deemed "progressive". We are, we congratulate ourselves, "putting the past behind us", as though the exercise of forgetting were self-evidently moral. Those who earlier took the option of publicly repudiating the victim version, take the new outlook as vindication.
But really it would be no more moral nor progressive to deny outright the hurt of the "shared history" than to buy the Christian Brothers' story without quibble. Yes, English culture bequeaths us great riches, but that doesn't make Cromwell misunderstood.
What is happening collectively now is not the embrace of a "revisionist" view, but the outcome of a restoration of our natural talent for creative duplicity.
Yes, we have come, after Winston Smith, to love Big Brother, but an irony born of native cunning protects us from the implications. The old victim compartment has being renovated to accommodate a new concept of our distinctness, based less on rage and hatred than on a certain affectionate condescension. We believe more strongly and more comfortably in our connection with England while holding more deeply to our distinctness and difference. You might indeed call it romantic.