Only The Annual Teenage Drunken Rampage Remains

Sinn Féin has accepted that the constitutional status of Northern Ireland cannot be changed without the consent, not only of the majority of voters there, but also of the majority of those who define themselves by their opposition to any such change. In other words, the majority of those voting No would have to vote Yes. Since that is impossible, change is impossible. Sinn Féin has signed up to this.

Where once one third, the Catholic third, of the population of Northern Ireland favoured union with the Republic, that figure is now only one third of Catholics, with fifty-two per cent of Catholics positively in favour of the continuing Union with Great Britain. As Northern Ireland has become more Catholic, the Catholic population has become more Unionist, until it is now predominantly so.

“Dissident” paramilitary activity raises the question of what we are paying for; Fianna Fáil hanged the IRA, as we had set it up to do. But no “dissident Republican” contested the 2010 General Election, and the Workers’ Party failed to contest West Belfast for the first time in living memory. Northern Nationalism as a political, rather than a cultural, phenomenon is now manifestly minimal.

Any statement of such aspiration is, on any objective criterion, the very last thing made by means of a vote for Sinn Féin. If that were not the case, then Sinn Féin, or indeed the SDLP, would receive a negligible number of votes from what is now the predominantly Unionist Catholic population.