The loyalists are pissed off cos the British agreed in 1998 to not maintain border infrastructure on the island of Ireland, and this has been made more difficult now cos of Brexit. So instead of setting the EU/U.K. border in Ireland it’s now down the Irish Sea in practical terms. In reality the Brits have just cut off Northern Ireland from mainland Britain in economic terms. This has come as a surprise to absolutely nobody but loyalists - the Brits would give us back Northern Ireland tomorrow if they thought for second we’d take it, place is an economic basket case constantly on the brink of conflict. Your Brit mate’s understanding of Irish history is actually very good for a brit, but there are some glaring errors. He claims we hid under the flag of neutrality during the war, but he has his wars confused. We couldn’t claim neutrality during WW1 cos we weren’t a country then, we were still a constituent part of the U.K. For some reason I’ve never fully understood the Irish couldn’t be drafted into the British forces during this war though. But the arguments relating to home rule between north and south was actually between loyalists and nationalists, both of whom set up their own volunteer armies to resist each other and/or the British depending on what decision they made. But when the war broke out both the loyalist UVF and nationalist IVF sent their volunteers to the war, so over 300k Irishmen fought in that war, with over 150k of those of the nationalist persuasion. We did support German efforts against the British during WW2 though. His waffle about the famine is just that. There has never been a famine in Ireland, to the point many won’t even describe it as such and it is never described as such in Irish (an gorta mor - the great hunger). A famine occurs when there is not enough food to feed the population. With our agricultural land a famine here is near impossible. At the moment I think we produce something like 20 times more food than we need and it’s not even our primary economic sector. The famine in Ireland was caused by landlords (both British and Irish, a lot of people here like to pretend it was just the Brits) exporting food produced here to more profitable regions and leaving us to starve. We could easily have supported our population even at mid-19 century levels if we held our own lands. He’s making the rising out as though it was ever supposed to be some genuine military effort. The rising was launched by about 1,000 IRB volunteers. No mention of an upcoming rising to the over 150k IVF volunteers who had gone to the continent. The rising was more about glorious death for the participants than anything else. It’s only become so central in Irish history since then because the Brits were stupid enough to execute the leaders. They had enjoyed no support from the natives and were even spat on when they were arrested, but a foreign force executing our people was always going to attract a violent response, and that violent response won us our freedom in 1921.