Dublin has taken up an old unionist stance

DUBLIN is still slavishly following instructions from Brussels, as Ruth Dudley Edwards notes (Comment, May 14), but, I suggest, it is slavishly following them not because of a love for Brussels — the one is simply using the other.

Licking-up suits Dublin, because it has now come around to what was once basically a unionist stance in regard to these Britannic islands.

And in that they want to derail Brexit.

This is something that people like Sammy Wilson just fail to notice — not the derailing, but the motive.

Being meddlesome up north on the part of Varadkar and Coveny is just a gimmick to distract from their taking what was an earlier unionist stance (a stance that became obscured in sectarianism); basically, unionist opposition to any separatist nationalisms that would bring about the Balkanisation of these islands.

And, sadly, unionists of various hues, never acting, but always reacting to what others do or say (as is the case today), just fall for it.

It was once a unionist argument in the north in rousing opposition to the threat of all-Ireland Dublin rule during the earlier part of the last century.

Unionists saw in such rule a possible threat to free trade between these islands.

They then feared that a Dublin-imposed (ourselves alone) restriction on trade between these islands (as did happen disastrously for a time until Sean Lemass reversed it and entered a Free Trade Agreement with a subsidy from the UK to assist its cattle farmers in 1965) would restrict the trade the north had built up since the Act of Union that took effect in 1801.

Now Brexit is threatening all of that and Dublin has every cause to be worried.

WA MILLER Belfast