John Bull's Other Island

The worst threat for five years? Oh, well, Gerry and Martin know who and where the dissidents are. Hey, they are even on Newsnight these days. When, in league with Rome as ever in Ireland (Ireland's love for Rome has always been as unrequited as Rome's love for England), London gave de Valera his own breakaway party and used it to supplant the party from which it had split, then the hanging of the IRA was the price that eventually had to be paid.

But those left behind have now been co-opted in the same way, by the same two forces, with the same one directing affairs on a day-to-day, or at least month-to-month, basis. Opposition to Catholic schools throughout Ireland, for which the dry run is the banishing of the Protestant churches from their historic role in the schools of Northern Ireland, cannot last. And nor can the toleration of a dissident threat. There has been none such in the South since Dev hanged it. There will be none such in the North once Gerry and Martin have shot it. As they know will, because that is the help for which they have been hired.

Fianna Fail, the more successful breakaway party that killed Sinn Fein and the IRA, in many cases literally, in the Free State and the Republic. Whoever could have engineered that? Fine Gael, the merger of those factions which had been prepared to accept King, Border or both in the first place, and initially committed to Commonwealth membership (which in those days meant the monarchy), admittedly for a United Ireland as the aspiration. Whoever could have engineered that? And Labour, affecting to be the party of James Connolly in the way that Fine Gael affects to be the party of Michael Collins, but in reality largely funded openly by unions that exist throughout these islands and are headquartered over here. Whoever could have engineered that? The "proxy" bit is as important as the "British" bit, but the reverse also holds.

When the "proxy" bit just meant agrarianism and the social implications of Catholicism, then no one in mainstream politics over here used to mind. A lot of them were themselves either or both, so the existence of a bulwark in these islands was no bad thing to them. And remember that the British Political Class has been signed up to the EU for decades, so there is no rift on that score.

If the Irish themselves minded, then there was always Sinn Fein. Clearly, then, they didn't mind at all. And now, of course, there isn't Sinn Fein, either. The dissidents? Only while they remain alive. So no, then, not really. Not for very much longer.