11/11/2022 0 Comments Are all celtics in ireland gpsyOne is that England has become used over the years to the insidious idea that what might be dubbed “Celtic dysfunction” is an immutable fact of life, a bit like the rain. There are a number of reasons for this, I think. ARE ALL CELTICS IN IRELAND GPSY PROFESSIONALOn my Twitter timeline, Scottish drug deaths - rather like the victims of Northern Irish paramilitary shootings and beatings - scarcely surface at all as a topic of serious concern among members of the London media and professional classes. It is admittedly a period of unusually feverish political drama, with a new strain of Covid-19 on the rampage and a Brexit deal in the balance until Christmas, but I don’t think that in other circumstances things would be any different. In the rest of the UK the story has briefly touched the news agenda before melting away. The findings have proved a political scandal in Scotland, taking up numerous column inches and leading to the resignation of Joe Fitzpatrick, the SNP minister for Public Health, Sport and Wellbeing. It emerged earlier this month that the country’s drug-related death toll is now 3.5 times that of England and Wales, and leads Europe by a shocking degree in 2019 there were 1,264 drug-related deaths in the country of 5 million, roughly seven out of ten of whom were male. The way in which the wider United Kingdom metabolised the recent story of Scotland’s drugs deaths is a case in point. The minutiae of one person’s fate can move strangers to tears, but a distant story of misery told only in large numbers is often easily brushed aside. It was an acute perception - put to most appalling use by Stalin himself - of the way that both individuals and the wider media process news of death. Josef Stalin famously commented that a single death is a tragedy, but one million is a statistic.
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