Perhaps it is no coincidence that the ten countries with the highest trust in government have systems of proportional representation.

The self-styled working-class hero has has picked the richest cabinet in history, including 13 billionaires, surrounding himself with the very elite he claims to oppose.

Trump is at his core a TV clown, and he knows instinctively just what sort of clown show will keep the audience fully engaged with the performance.

How then is Ireland’s engagement with and experience of empire remembered (or not) and represented and mis-represented? White supremacists in the USA, for instance, misleadingly suggest that Irish indentured servitude in the 17th-century Caribbean equated to white chattel slavery and thereby distort the true meaning and misery of black slavery. In Ireland, over the last decade, we have marked a number of very significant centenaries, including the first World War (1914-18), the most imperial of conflicts; the 1916 Rebellion, which helped to trigger the unravelling of the British empire; and the partition of Ireland (1920), which served as the template for the later partitions of India and Pakistan, and Israel and Palestine. This period of commemoration, combined with the recent campaigns associated with Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall, are forcing a fundamental re-examination of our history, how we remember, and how we forget.