Only British intelligence could have split Sinn Féin so as to create Fianna Fáil. Until very recently, Sinn Féin never tired of making the point that the main parties in the Irish Republic were British proxies. In its early days, Fianna Fáil hanged the IRA, as we had set it up to do.
Well, who are the proxies now? But then, which presidential candidate in the Republic has been very Special for most of his adult life? So “dissident” paramilitary activity raises a very simple, and vitally important, question: what are we paying for?
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What on earth are you talking about?
ReplyDeleteBritain set up Fianna Fáil. No one else could have engineered that 1926 secession from Sinn Féin, which duly went on to hang the IRA.
ReplyDeleteLikewise, only Britain could have engineered the 1933 merger of the Blueshirts, Cumann na nGaedheal and the National Centre Party, complete with a commitment to Commonwealth membership (which in those days necessitated retention of the monarchy, and a very high degree of integration in foreign policy and defence), albeit for a United Ireland as the ultimate aim.
Fine Gael went on to be outmanoeuvred into declaring the 26-County Republic that neither it nor anyone else then wanted as such, but before that, while the King retained certain functions as Head of the Commonwealth, Fianna Fáil had already felt obliged to install as the first (internal) President Douglas Hyde, an antidote to the historically illiterate association of the Irish language with Nationalism.
The Irish Labour Party has always been funded by trade unions which exist throughout these Islands and are headquartered in Britain, and in Conor Cruise O’Brien it returned to the Dáil probably the only full-blown Unionist ever to sit in it.
Of course Dublin governments have always been, in Sinn Féin’s words, “British governments by proxy”. That much has always been obvious. By adhering to the British proxy parties rather than to Sinn Féin, the voters of the 26 Counties have always made it clear that it was what they wanted. They continue to make that clear.
And who are the British proxies now? 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.
“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.
Almost never does anyone else now seem to wish to seek election on that basis, either. Those of that mind may set off bombs, or engage annually in an almost ritual example of drunken teenage rampaging. But they know that no one would vote for them, and that quite possibly so few people would sign their nomination papers that they could not present themselves in search of votes in the first place.
Beyond those under the combined influence of alcohol or other intoxicants and adolescent levels of testosterone, everyone now concedes, by deed even if not necessarily by word, that the Catholic, left-wing and all-Ireland cases are all for the Union.
They regret only, in all three of those terms, the 1922 partition of the United Kingdom and of the Irish Catholic ethnic group throughout these Islands.
So must we all.