The British, of course, were masterful at it. We are painfully aware of the results in India, and perhaps those echoes are partly why wandering around Ireland makes one feel right at home. When the British colonial blowtorch was done, it had successfully painted Ireland as a boring backward bog, and reduced the Irishman to the derisive "Paddy" - a drunken, brainless, incompetent, superstitious yob incapable of self-governance. It was the ultimate PR con job.
But the Irish fought back, as the colonised tend to. The British ripped out Gaelic and replaced it with English, and the Irish wrote some of the greatest English works ever; Jonathan Swift, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, J M Synge, Samuel Beckett, W B Yeats and James Joyce inspired Ireland and made Irish genius world-famous. The British imposed their politics, and the Irish sent Parnell to Westminster to take them back. The British shipped Irish grain to its soldiers even as millions of Irish starved and died of famine, and a quarter of the population sailed for the New World on ships like the Jeanie Johnston, creating a vast, proud diaspora. (Ireland, with a peak population of eight million in the 1830s, now 4.7 million, today features in the genetic ancestry of an estimated 80 million people.)
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They fought a War of Independence, became the Irish Free State and finally threw off the last shackles of British control to become - effectively in 1937, officially in 1949 - the Republic of Ireland. The internecine Troubles killed thousands in the 1970s. They've been divided and ruled, turned one against each other and partitioned. Their green, white and orange flag is only one more thing that feels terribly familiar about Ireland.
Inexplicably, this tough, tempered people came through colonial brutality only to be seen, today, as painfully twee - if you believe the tourist iconography, Ireland is all about St Patrick, jolly drinking and fat little cartoon leprechauns.
A country that fought a civil war over religion, and a generation ago wouldn't hear a word against the Catholic church, has made contraception widely available, decriminalised homosexuality and, last month, voted to legalise gay marriage. They've had a massively accomplished woman president. Hard knocks have turned them not into defensive conservatives but into progressive liberals, with a sense of common humanity in the face of suffering and mortality.
Irish drink has had a difficult history, too. Guinness beer may be justly famous today, but while Jameson is virtually synonymous with Irish whisky, not everyone knows that the Irish came up with whisky, have the world's oldest licensed distillery (Bushmills) and at one point had 400 whisky brands, before American Prohibition and other disasters ground the industry down to just five brands. Meanwhile, Scotland gets all the credit.
And as for the fairies, there's nothing remotely twee about them. Seeing a liss (a fairy "fort" or "ring") growing wild and untouched in the middle of a perfectly tended field, gives you a sense of the dead serious cultural power of those mysterious, often malignant beings that live under the earth. They are part of an ancient, still vital belief system that coexists alongside Christianity.
But that's just to deal with the stereotypes.
Perhaps reading and loving many Irish writers in addition to those above predisposed me to feel that a land that can produce such disproportionate literary genius must be a special land indeed. It has always been on my wish list. And yet its sheer physical beauty - its hills and moors, streams and lakes, its fretted coast and dramatic skies - took my breath away. I was unprepared for the extraordinary warmth of the Irish and fell in love with the Celtic music that so perfectly expresses both their melancholy and spiritedness. This is a country that still values creativity, art, wit and having a good time before we all die, as a cultural instinct.
I apologise if I'm sounding like a brochure. It's because I can't get over the fact that Indians keep shooting off in droves to London every summer, to join droves of wildly shopping Arabs, while Ireland just lies there, an hour's flight away, beautiful and ignored, with - just to let you know - the best pubs in the world.
I guess we're still buying the PR con.