Our time will come... and without Sinn Féin

I’M just an average man. I didn’t go to college but I did enough to scrape an honours Leaving Cert because I had a good memory. I remember 50 years ago I accompanied our esteemed former Minister for Foreign Affairs, David Andrews, while he canvassed in Sallynoggin. Instantly, I was cured of my political aspirations, except, of course, for retaining my position as a hurler on the ditch.

Over 20 years ago I prophesised that somebody would leave the EU in the first 50 years.

Britain obliged, but by jingo, Mary Lou McDonald seems hell bent on continuing to present Sinn Féin as a militant army. Most recently, at a Sinn Féin fundraising dinner in New York, she concluded her speech with a reckless, ‘Up the rebels.’

When is she going to learn that Sinn Féin’s ongoing refusal to take their seats in the British parliament, combined with the jingoistic nonsense she goes on with, will prolong the time it will take for a united Ireland to emerge from the fog.

Brexit is a gift from the gods to Sinn Féin.

It won’t happen in my lifetime, because I’m too old now, but in ten years’ time, I believe my children and my children’s children will be living in a 32-county Ireland.

For this to come about, at least ten years of economic chaos is inevitable as the only way forward to a united Ireland.

Regardless of what kind of border we end up with with, damage will be the inevitable outcome.

Britain’s decision to opt out of the EU is the most disastrous decision they have made since they decided to believe that England could have won this year’s World Cup.

A united Ireland will come about because, whatever kind of border it is in the end, the border is actually a community and not a line on a map.

Already there is the necessary rapport between citizens North and South.This rapport will grow despite the efforts of the DUP to bring their evangelistic zeal to any negotiations.

The real difficulty will be how to ease the North of Ireland into a 32county Irish republic without them having to sacrifice the huge subsidies they get from London.

It certainly won’t be lost on the lesser members of Sinn Féin that portraying themselves as rebels will prolong the duration of time it will take to achieve this end.

Let’s be honest, the average British person doesn’t give a hoot about the great scandal of our time in the Irish Republic, which is the squandering of the opportunity to be ahead of all the other countries in the EU in the development of new technology.

We are at least 15 years behind in the roll out of broadband to half a million people in rural Ireland.

That extra number of people online could change the whole economic picture in the Republic and will have extra special effect on the economy of the North.

Both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are equally guilty of being short-sighted, and they have been caught on the hop by the speed of the technological advances.

It’s glaringly obvious that the nature of work is going to continue to change dramatically via the web.

There will be new jobs created, something which they don’t appear to have appreciated with any great foresight.

These new jobs will need people who are trained in computer skills and already technology has overtaken the hard border and the soft border.

We’ll become an island with one set of rules and this will happen because the internet is unstoppable.

THERE was a right old ding-dong on the telly last Monday when RTÉ’s Claire Byrne went to Belfast and the BBC’s Stephen Nolan came to Dublin.

This was good cop, bad cop stuff of the highest order.

Claire was quite demure and a subtle interrogator.

Stephen, on the other hand, bellowed at the DUP representative and told him firmly, that he, the interviewer, and not the honourable member, was going to control the debate.

And control it he did with cannonballs and rockets exploding the arguments of all and sundry. It was great stuff.