Donaldson denying history of Ireland

HEARING the DUP’s Jeffrey Donaldson speaking on RTE radio regarding Northern Ireland, Ireland and Brexit is incredibly depressing.

His insistence that Northern Ireland is exactly the same — and must be treated the same — as the rest of the UK is a wilful denial of history.

The terrible beauty of Ireland — a land rent asunder with six of its counties politically amputated in the aftermath of 1916 — will worsen if such a jingoistic approach is brought to the Brexit negotiations.

Did the Brexiteers ever give the slightest thought to the problems of Ireland, its internal border and the fallout from Britain’s imperial past? I doubt it.

I suspect they were used to seeing their homeland geography as a very British archipelago with the southern part of its western island (the Republic of Ireland land mass) lopped off; an irrelevance.