You’re quite correct - for various reasons, I don’t feel able to discuss the Irish issues in detail - I was taught a very warped version of history myself when it came to Ireland and I know it.
But the question was largely about how George III is perceived in Britain and while I agree that his actions towards Ireland should be regarded as a failure, I don’t think they have much impact on how he is perceived in modern Britain as a whole. England - and then Britain - failed time and time again to properly address the issues of Ireland and when modern Britons see the failures at all, they all tend to roll together in their minds.
“You’re quite correct - for various reasons, I don’t feel able to discuss the Irish issues in detail - I was taught a very warped version of history myself when it came to Ireland and I know it.”
It is quite lamentable how poorly Ireland is covered in British history where it is often sidelined, or a mere footnote, with writers seemingly perplexed and treating it as an abstruse issue of no real relevance to wider history, despite Ireland often playing a central role in the history of British events.
You will see this frequently in historical fiction or drama, a case in point being anything set in pre-WWI history, the end of the long Edwardian summer as war approaches and invariably when politics is mentioned it will focus of some young flapper suffragette. Thus ignoring the fact that at that time the UK was literally on the point of civil war for the first time in 300 years, with the army on the point of mutiny and private armies being formed and funded by members of the British establishment over the question of Home Rule and Ulster. It is simply erased from the historical memory because it is about Ireland and Ireland is such a troublesome and unpleasant issue.
I grew up in Northern Ireland and devoured Irish and British history (I was living through an interesting chunk of it) but even I was affected by this blindness toward Ireland in the mainstream British textbooks we used in school. A case in point, I spent my summers on the coast, out to sea the magnificent profile of Rathlin Island could be clearly seen on the horizon, it was part of my childhood and yet I had no idea that Sir Walter Raleigh had massacred hundreds of men, women and children on Rathlin.
We were taught about Raleigh, about his swashbuckling adventures, tobacco, laying his cloak on the ground for his queen, all that stuff but apparently none of our teachers thought to inform us (did they even know?) about Raleigh’s murderous behaviour on an island not fifty miles from where we sat. I can’t help thinking if Horatio Nelson, for example, had massacred hundreds of men, women and children on the Isle of Wight, this fact might have been mentioned somewhere in the histories of the great admiral.
But Rathlin was in Ireland, and Ireland was simply whitewashed out of British textbooks, so that every generation when trouble erupted again in Ireland the British people were again left in bewilderment as to what on earth the problem was over there in that God’s cursed island.