The Proxy President

In the run-up to the tremendously successful 2011 State Visit, 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 it described simply as “the Queen”. 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. Ted Kennedy’s knighthood was an obvious dry run for that of someone from Sinn Féin, almost certainly Gerry Adams, who would thus have become the Jan Smuts de nos jours if sad revelations about his family had not intervened.

Sinn Féin’s sell-out, which is what it is, is almost universally popular. “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 they 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.