Tag Archives: Union
Opportunity knocks
We don’t yet know how Brexit will affect Northern Ireland exactly, but the referendum result certainly revived the nationalist trope that Irish unity is ‘inevitable’.
The Republic’s national parliament recently published plans for a forum “to achieve the peaceful reunification of Ireland”, Sinn Fein blithely assure unionists that the “British identity” will be protected in a thirty-two county state and newspaper columnists rush to tell readers that the fourth green field will soon “bloom again”. One particularly excitable author, Kevin Meagher, a former special adviser to Shaun Woodward, (remind me again why unionists didn’t trust that former secretary of state), even called his book “A United Ireland: Why unification is inevitable”.
In response, unionists have challenged nationalism’s “self-regarding, single certainty” in a series of astute articles.
Wither nationalism… ?
So the election is over. Leaving aside the overall picture, it can be said that this was good election for Unionists.
Keep your head on
In his excellent study of Ideology and the Irish Question, Paul Bew quoted a Ballymoney Free Press editorial of May 1912 at the height of the Irish Home Rule crisis. ‘The statement of Unionist Ulster’, it announced, ‘is that it merely wants to be let alone’. Unfortunately, ‘since Satan entered the Garden of Eden good people will not be let alone’. Unionists want to be ‘let alone’: unfortunately ‘good people will not be let alone.’
We are again at one of those moments which echoes that Ballymoney Free Press editorial. What has changed today is the sense of urgency and opportunity. Republicans are determined not to let Unionists alone on the matter of Irish unity.
EU offers instability to North, or South, or both.
Indications from the EU leaders’ summit (now not including the UK) suggest they are minded to allow a post-Brexit Northern Ireland a seamless transition back into the EU if that Northern Ireland were part of a united Ireland.
At first sight this might appear radical.
Of paradoxes
Newton Emerson is a journalist whose articles are always worth reading. His unique contribution is to engage honestly and intelligently with Irish politics without indulging those liberal pieties, that all too often provides thin cover for ancestral voices. He is all the more refreshing when found in the Irish Times which particularly lends itself to liberal piety, thinly covering ancestral voices, conveyed in the tone of smug Southern self-righteousness.