A united Ireland

It has never been a good idea, and we must stop the BS of declaring it is, writes Declan Lynch

Because it is a sacred cow, it has always been considered respectable in this country to talk about the prospect of a United Ireland, as if it was an inherently reasonable thing — even an inherently good thing.

But it is not a good thing. It is a bad thing.

And it was always a bad thing, even when it was enshrined in our Constitution as our deepest aspiration. It was still a bad thing when that aspiration was removed, in order to stop people killing each other over it. And it has become a particularly bad thing now that the nationalist delinquency of the English has caused our own nationalist delinquency to re-emerge, with talk of ‘Border polls’ and the like.

Mainly the border-poll stuff is just the latest gambit by the Provos in their ceaseless quest to cause trouble, to take advantage of whatever chaos is unfolding, to spread their poison.

But it is the voices of the respectable classes that are most egregious — you hear them on the radio, murmuring away about the turmoil in the UK and what it might mean for the prospects of a United Ireland, as if they were talking about some humanitarian project on which all sensible people are agreed.

So relaxed do they sound about it all, you’d never imagine for a moment that what they are chattering about has the potential to turn this relatively peaceful place in which we live into another Bosnia.

Just like the last time, really, when issues pertaining to the United Ireland brought about the deaths of thousands of people, and we were lucky it only amounted to that. Lucky that it never reached the levels of the former Yugoslavia, mainly because there were enough people down here who realised that they could make a contribution to limiting the carnage — and that one of the ways to do this, was to stop this bullshit about wanting a United Ireland. Especially as we didn’t really want it anyway, or at least we didn’t want it enough to pay for it, or otherwise to go through whatever insanity we would have to endure, to get there.

No, we called bullshit on it; we stopped feeding the nationalist monster. And while this wasn’t the only thing that led to the almost unnatural peace which has settled on Northern Ireland since then, it certainly helped to avert a full-scale civil war on this island in which the estimated 3,600 who died in The Troubles might have turned out more like 30,000.

Yeah, it was damn close-run thing, that last run at the old United Ireland and all the other controversies arising from “the troubled relationship between the two traditions” — and, for a while, we seemed to appreciate that we hadn’t gone full Bosnia, enough at least to shut up about it for a while. We even took the ‘claim’ to the North out of the Constitution, along with all the other garbage that would have to be taken out in the fullness of time.

But now it’s back, this jabbering that you hear wherever two or more Official Irelanders — these recreational nationalists — are gathered to exchange their banalities. Now they’re at it again, shooting the breeze about the prospects of a United Ireland, given all the changes brought about by Brexit and so forth .

And of course, it was widely accepted in the Good Friday Agreement and all that jazz, that if the Unionists consented to a United Ireland, then that would be fine. So you’d think a point would come in these casual conversations about the United Ireland, where someone would say, “And have we checked about that consent thing?” To which the answer would be: “Actually, it seems they don’t consent to it, they’re still saying no.”

At which point, the matter could be closed and the babbling could shift to other subjects, like how well Simon Coveney comes across on the BBC.

But Official Ireland struggles with that whole ‘consent’ thing, because they have never had the imagination — the really small amount of imagination — it takes to figure that, for Unionists, a bunch of recreational nationalists chatting about taking them into the care of this Republic, might feel a bit like us listening to various Brits on BBC Radio 4 having a relaxing discussion about taking back the South.

Above all, it demonstrates the extreme lack of awareness of the United Irelander; lack of awareness of self, and lack of awareness of others. Because at the root of that dismal obsession is the belief that the Prods up there, well… they’ve just got it wrong. They are blind to their own best interests. They don’t really know who they are, because basically there’s something wrong with them. They don’t realise how much better things would be if they set aside all the gibberish that sustains them, and listened to us for a while.

And once it is properly explained to them, by these nice reasonable people talking on radio programmes in Dublin, they will surely see how wrong they have been. They will rise above their Orange foolishness with their ludicrous parades and their atrocious flute-playing, realising at last that it was all a terrible mistake. And then everything will be great.

This is the state of mind of the United Irelanders, past and present. So impenetrable is their eejitry, they can’t even work out that for much of the 20th Century, their beloved Republic was a festering wasteland of poverty and superstition, while the Nordies were availing of the manifold advantages of the British welfare state — so they were not wrong to want to have nothing to do with us, they were right. Indeed, nobody has ever been more right about anything than they were about that.

And still... still it continues, still some of the most revered voices in this country can be heard musing on the possibilities of the United Ireland, which seem so intoxicating to them.

One word: No.