Ireland’s Future sounds a shade too much like Ireland’s past

ÉAMON de Valera, with excruciating precision, as far back as 1933 set out the position of the Irish government for ending partition: first make the Republic a warm house for Northern Protestants.

In 1970, Jack Lynch, taking the Haugheyites in his party to task, spoke with the same trenchancy as Micheál Martin does today.

“The plain truth — the naked reality — is that we do not possess the capacity to impose a solution by force. Even if we had that capacity what would be the result if we decided to apply it? Do we want to adopt the role of an occupying conqueror over the one million or so Six County citizens who at present support partition? Would we compel them to flee the country altogether or live under our domination, in constant opposition, feverishly nursing hatred and secretly plotting revenge?

“Thus we would have worked ourselves into the role of overlords, a role that would necessitate the imposition by us on the subjugated new minority of the Six Counties, and the whole country, of some of the hateful and tyrannical practices that we and the world so recently called an abomination. Is this the Ireland we want? Is this the kind of Irishmen we wish to be? Is this the kind of unity we want to achieve?”

Most of us in the Republic know De Valera, Lynch and Martin have laid down a political line from which it would be foolish to depart for three reasons: financial, political and moral.

Financially, the next generation is in hock to pay off the crash of 2008 to the tune of €150bn. Covid will cost €50bn but the effects of the lockdowns and ongoing vaccination will double that to another €100bn. So why on earth should anyone want to saddle them with the black hole of Northern Ireland?

Second, most people in the Republic know that we could not cope with nearly one million unionists forced into a united Ireland — so why cause trouble by talking about unity until Northern Protestants want to talk about it without pressure?

Finally, most of us in the Republic funk saying this publicly — many of us privately also baulk at importing the tribal politics of those Northern nationalists who follow a Sinn Féin agenda.

In recent years, a group I call Nagging Nationalists have started a campaign to browbeat the Republic into browbeating the Prods into a united Ireland.

Fifty years ago, nationalists could legitimately claim to be second-class citizens.

But Northern nationalists have had civil rights since 1974. Most of the Nagging Nationalists, especially those who parade as victims in southern media, were born long after British soldiers “clumped through their homes”.

Indeed, far from being an oppressed class, northern nationalists are streaking ahead of Protestants in higher education. Some of the wealthiest people in Northern Ireland are Roman Catholics. We need not mention the NHS.

Meantime, the loyalist working class, badly led by the major unionist parties, has been slipping back, socially and politically.

Here I need hardly nail my colours to the mast. As a Wolfe Tone Republican I regard a vote for Sinn Féin as a delinquent act.

Furthermore, as long as nationalists vote for a fascist party like Sinn Féin, unionists will hold a higher moral ground in my mind.

Unionists may have been stupid about Brexit. But political stupidity is not political murder.

‘The more we talk up a united Ireland, the less chance we have to get unionists to the table’

How can anyone believe that discrimination in housing and in voting justified the Provisional IRA’s Nazi-style pogroms against innocent Protestant small farmers along the Fermanagh border?

Northern Protestants didn’t fire the fatal shots on Bloody Sunday. And Northern Protestant victims were not confined to their 790 civilian dead from Le Mon to Enniskillen.

The IRA also killed 319 RUC officers and maimed and crippled another 9,000. Most were attacked long after civil rights had been won, most were Protestants, blown up with bombs like Drew Harris’s father, sometimes shot in front of their children.

The IRA campaign was murder most foul, and it’s time we said so as plainly as we did 25 years ago when tens of thousands of us marched in Dublin in protest at the Provo bombing of Canary Wharf.

Time we also paid tribute to the decent majority of Northern Protestants who bore the brunt of the Provos’ savage sectarian campaign yet never lowered themselves to vote for loyalist paramilitaries.

In contrast, most Northern nationalists vote for Sinn Féin, a party whose IRA wing, having butchered Protestants for nearly 25 years, is now trying to browbeat them into premature border polls as a prelude to pushing them into a united Ireland.

But not content with browbeating Northern Protestants, the Nationalist Naggers are now trying to browbeat the Irish Republic to go where it does not want to go and should not go.

Sinn Féin is the biggest of the browbeaters but it is not alone. In recent years, it has been reinforced by an academic, posher version of Nationalist Naggers called Ireland’s Future.

Professor Colin Harvey is a leading light of Ireland’s Future. Another big gun in the debate is Professor Brendan O’Leary, who works from the University of Pennsylvania.

Prof Harvey, who professed to be all for dialogue, recently blocked a Twitter attempt to talk to him by Ian Acheson, a tolerant unionist supporter of a Shared Island.

Prof O’Leary has written a turgid three-volume academic tome, A Treatise on Northern Ireland (2019), which few, except me, seem to have read.

My lack of confidence in his grasp of what is going on in Ireland is summed up by a remark in volume three.

Here he makes the claim that “the PIRA is gone, even if a veteran’s army council persists”.

Thus Prof O’Leary knows better than Irish government ministers, and security officials, in both Ireland and the UK, who seem to think, unlike him, that the IRA army council is more than an old boys’ club.

Last Tuesday, Prof Colin Harvey and lawyer Mark Bassett presented their

2019 paper on planning for Constitutional Change in Ireland to the Oireachtas Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement.

Senator Niall Blaney, whose base in Donegal means he is well briefed on the sensitivity of the situation, was critical of the failure of Ireland’s Future to bring unionists on board.

He asked: “What dialogue have they had with unionist communities and politicians and what are their impressions of the report?”

Cutting even deeper, he added: “We have not had the necessary dialogue to bring unionists with us and create trust. The idea of the shared island unit is to create that trust and start working with them.”

He went on to point out the elephant not in the room. “We are here having a discussion and there are no unionists at our meeting.”

He finished with this simple, timeless truth:

“The more that we talk up a united Ireland, the less chance that we have of getting unionists to the table. I do not like to think of what the future will hold in that scenario. Peace has been hard-won on this island and I would not want to take steps back before we go forward.”