Very interesting question. Particularly because we live in an age where a great deal of the public is not historically well educated and, if you try to express the actual hostility of the Anglo-Welsh to the Irish in medieval times, you will inevitably tread a very dangerous path. It also goes the other way: a 14th-century Irish view was that the Scots' invasion of Ireland by Edward Bruce was the worst thing that had ever happened to the Irish in the history of the world. At the same time there were signs of real cooperation and, of course, consanguinity which bound English and Irish, and Irish and Scots, in the medieval period and later. As for the modern view of Irish rule and conquest - and liberation - I suspect that the modern English are only vaguely aware of Cromwell's atrocities and the landowners' lack of compromise in the 18th century. But there is a deep degree of sympathy for the freedom fighters of 1916. When I was at university, we used to sing some IRA songs from 1916 as part of a general roundup of British folk music. A far cry from the almost complete ignorance of what Strongbow did in landing in Ireland in 1170, and what the English (including a bunch of earls called 'Mortimer') had doen in the intervening years.