dr_evil

ireland said:

jimble4599 said:

The fact that Apple actually commented is what intrigues me. There's been speculation about a Dublin Apple Store for years and they've never commented. So this could be the real deal. Especially with the booming economy and the influx of American retailers over the past 5 years.

Are you sure they've never commented? You think our economy is booming? Our national dept: €184,622,041,664 Where are you located? As my uncle said (he was head of business in an Irish university) 'Germany now own us and they never even had to go to war with us'.

The Germans were obviously playing a long game.  Contrary to what your uncle says, Germany did* go to war with Ireland; it just took a century to bear fruit.  

* Ireland went to war with Germany on 4 August 1914, as one of the constituent kingdoms of the United Kingdom.  That war ended on 11 November 1918.  As a matter of its own constitutional law, the Republic of Ireland fixes the date of its creation as (at the earliest) 21 January 1919, the date of the first Dáil, of the first Declaration of Independence by an Irish elected assembly, and of the outbreak of the Irish War of Independence (it was a busy day). As an aside: so far as British law is concerned, the Irish Free State was not created until 6 December 1922.  

So whichever way you look at it, from the British or Irish perspective, or that of the law of armed conflict, Ireland and Germany did go to war. The names of over 49,400 dead Irishmen listed at the Irish National War Memorial Gardens in Islandbridge, Dublin attest to this.  That's a big chunk of the 900,000 dead from the whole British Empire during the First World War. To put that number in perspective, Ireland's War of Independence against Britain from 21 January 1919 to 11 July 1921 claimed a total of around 2,000 dead, on both sides, including civilians.  Or to put it another way, the United States lost 116,516 dead in the First World War: that's 2.5 times Ireland's number but with a population which at the time was 30 times as large.  

Sorry for what must seem an off-topic rant, but the historical amnesia of my own countrymen demeans the sacrifice of those who gave their lives in a conflict many people there would rather forget.  For an academic to crack a joke which relies on that was poor form.  

Besides, this post is not completely off-topic: the building we are talking about dates from 1922, the era of the creation of the Irish state. It was rebuilt by Clery's in that year after having been completely destroyed in the 1916 Easter Rising.