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monks he worked for.

So what did they pay you?

A certain amount of wheat per year, the man replied.

Wasn't that terrible? He was asked.

Well it certainly wasn't useful as they already fed my family throughout the year, the man replied to the laughter of the monks.

Had Tibet been left to its own devices the church scandals and democratic revolutions that took place in this century would likely have changed Feudal Tibet for better or worse as some might see it.

But modernisation and democracy, like democracy in the Islamic world as George Bush discovered, cannot be imported.

Our societies are much more fluid than that. We all have a fondness for the vagaries of our past. We all need and want to do it our own way. It is a journey every nation takes in its own unique way.

For China, it is on this journey and can see the progress from the past.

For Tibet, the starting point is not the same. They cannot see the Chinese way as progress because they are not coming from the same spot. They have literally been dumped in the middle of a strange path and are rightly upset and scared.

They long for the Dalai Lama to return and for Tibet, whether as an autonomous part of China or a country in its own right, to start forward from the point of severance into its future.

And make no mistake, the Tibetans have very real expectations of change once Tibet is theirs once again.

The best "victory" the Chinese can achieve in Tibet is the path the Dalai Lama is warning about, mass relocation creating a minority Tibetan population but they will create another Northern Ireland (Plantation of Ulster - Queen Elizabeth 1611) and the British can verify what a hollow victory that became.

The extinguishing of the Dalai Lama's influence and the Buddhist's calls to avoid violence will result not in lessen their feelings for Tibet but in a propensity for more violence, as we saw in the current riots. Does China want to be a Sri Lanka or Spain? Does it want to have Tibetan separatist setting bombs in the Beijing subway?

China has a very bright future. But like Indonesia with East Timor, it must realise that some provinces are not worth the trouble and will only hold back China's rightful march for to regain it's significant place in the world.

As a child of the first generation of free Irish, let's not wait 800 years for the inevitable for Tibet

Learn more about this author, Pauline Bleach.
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