ignorant or what?

I heard two Irish girls talking on the bus a couple of days back. From their coversation I gleaned they were students and that they had a problem with the English and Welsh students attending their classes. One of them reported this stupid Englishmen who had incurred her displeasure and censure by claiming that Ireland was a part of the British Isles. 'Will they never get it?' she rhetorically mused. Well the Englishman was right and merely exposed the ignorance of his Irish classmate: Ireland is indeed part of the British Isles, as is the Isle of Man and all of Great Britain. 'British Isles' is a geographical term, not a political one. The Republic of Ireland is not part of the United Kingdom, however, which comprises England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (formally it is often referred to as the Province of Northern Ireland, and the BBC routinely labels it the 'province'). It's one thing for Irish people to bemoan English people's ignorance of the poltical status of their country, which is rampant and deplorable, but quite another for them to confuse political and geographcial nomenclature.