In The Old Days,

when I had a childish faith in democracy,
I (middle-class drop-out) cast my vote
for Ireland's only Marxist party
which is tiny – though probably not because
The Great Karl's great bourgeois pal despised the Irish
and (like many in Britain
and the US at the time)
pronounced them barely human.

Engels wrote that they were a people "almost without civilisation" and with "rough, intemperate ways", with “a southern facile character,” living "in filth and in a state of drunkenness."  Afflicted by  “the idiocy of rural life”, they were an irredeemably backward people who would soon be submerged by the dynamics of industrial capitalism.

 “For work which requires long training or regular, pertinacious application, the dissolute, unsteady, drunken Irishman is on too low a plane.”

"The facile character of the Irishman, his crudity, which places him but little above the savage, his contempt for all humane enjoyments, in which is very crudeness makes him incapable of sharing, his filth and his poverty, all favour drunkenness."

– The Condition of the Working Class in England.