What were Martin McGuinness and Eamon Gilmore doing in 1975?
The entire system of government in Northern Ireland is
designed to ensure that the Provos are always in office, while the Stickies'
coup within the moribund old Irish Labour Party, which always holds the balance
of power in the Republic, effectively places them in the same position. The
number two job in both states is now always held by the organisation that not
very long ago was trying to bomb them both out of existence. Gilmore's wing of that organisation did not decommission its weapons until 8th February 2010, within the last 24 hours of the existence of the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning.
The responses that I have had to yesterday's post on Ireland have been extraordinary, though of course not unexpected. Questioning that Ireland, with no Catholic intellectual or cultural life whatever (Protestants and militant atheists, yes, with the latter no new phenomenon), was until lately the beating heart of the Catholic world strikes to the core in the same way as questioning that the Irish are the most oppressed people ever.
But Saint Thomas More, Saint John Fisher, John Lingard, Lord Acton, Blessed John Henry Newman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hilaire Belloc, G K Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, even Graham Greene: the Irish equivalents of these and so many other figures, right down to the present day, simply do not exist and have never done so. And that is only England, herself hardly the heart and soul of Catholic life. "The scandals" have not done for the Church in Ireland. Her foundations there were always weak to nonexistent.
The old chestnut has been dug up that the present Republic was a British imposition anyway, and that the Irish fought against it. Really? Barely within living memory. And very shortly after coming to power within it, those who had fought against it hunted down and hanged those who were still doing so. Anyone would have thought that Britain had set up Fianna Fáil. No one else could have
engineered that 1926 secession from Sinn Féin, which duly went on to
hang the IRA. Sinn Féin has never tired of pointing out the uncontested
fact of this matter. Last year, at least one Fianna Fáil branch raised funds, both for itself and for its local
hurling team, by raffling tickets to meet the Queen, whom the publicity described simply as "the Queen". Well, of course, on every point.
Likewise, 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 it got its own back when it came to the choice of the first President, himself an antidote to the strange, ahistorical virus that deludes people into associating the Irish language with Nationalism. And the Irish Labour Party has always been funded very largely, and of course entirely openly, by trade unions which exist throughout these Islands and are headquartered in England, usually in London.
Practically no one fights against the present situation these days. Sinn Féin is completely signed up, since the arrangements in Northern Ireland are designed entirely for that party's benefit. The Workers' Party did not contest West Belfast in 2010. Its erstwhile comrades are installed in office in Dublin, where a United Ireland has simply not been on the agenda for decades and the mere suggestion of it, rare though that is, is greeted with undisguised horror. The Republic's banks have been saved by the British taxpayer at the direction of a Chancellor of Her Majesty's Exchequer who is the heir to an Ascendancy baronetcy. The Queen has been so rapturously received, even on the very turf of Croke Park, that she wants to go back. Drunken or otherwise intoxicated youths burn off testosterone annually on the Falls Road or the Bogside, giving a whole new meaning to the term "supergrass", but one rapidly grows out of that sort of thing. The only question is why the people whom we maintain as born again pillars of the Establishment in order to ensure that there are no "dissident Republicans" are not being as ruthless towards today's as Dev was towards a previous generation's.
Oh, well, at least I did not mention that the Potato Famine was a natural disaster which would have happened anyway, that Ireland on her own would have been vastly more devastated by it than she was with the resources of the Union and the Empire at her disposal, that the rural poor in Britain were also not exactly living the high life in the 1840s, and that today's Irish must by definition be descended from those who survived the Famine rather than from those who died in it. Now, that really would have set them off.
Likewise, 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 it got its own back when it came to the choice of the first President, himself an antidote to the strange, ahistorical virus that deludes people into associating the Irish language with Nationalism. And the Irish Labour Party has always been funded very largely, and of course entirely openly, by trade unions which exist throughout these Islands and are headquartered in England, usually in London.
Practically no one fights against the present situation these days. Sinn Féin is completely signed up, since the arrangements in Northern Ireland are designed entirely for that party's benefit. The Workers' Party did not contest West Belfast in 2010. Its erstwhile comrades are installed in office in Dublin, where a United Ireland has simply not been on the agenda for decades and the mere suggestion of it, rare though that is, is greeted with undisguised horror. The Republic's banks have been saved by the British taxpayer at the direction of a Chancellor of Her Majesty's Exchequer who is the heir to an Ascendancy baronetcy. The Queen has been so rapturously received, even on the very turf of Croke Park, that she wants to go back. Drunken or otherwise intoxicated youths burn off testosterone annually on the Falls Road or the Bogside, giving a whole new meaning to the term "supergrass", but one rapidly grows out of that sort of thing. The only question is why the people whom we maintain as born again pillars of the Establishment in order to ensure that there are no "dissident Republicans" are not being as ruthless towards today's as Dev was towards a previous generation's.
Oh, well, at least I did not mention that the Potato Famine was a natural disaster which would have happened anyway, that Ireland on her own would have been vastly more devastated by it than she was with the resources of the Union and the Empire at her disposal, that the rural poor in Britain were also not exactly living the high life in the 1840s, and that today's Irish must by definition be descended from those who survived the Famine rather than from those who died in it. Now, that really would have set them off.
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