Mary-Lou "United Ireland is within touching distance"

[Marsupial]

Irish language and GAA has crossed rubicons into places like East Belfast.

Surely parity of esteem for both traditions requires RTE to broadcast an occasional News/Nuacht programme in Ullans (with subtitles, so the Ulster Scots can understand it!)?

 

[Purple]

There were instituted policies of exclusion and discrimination.

Gerrymandering and allocation of housing and public funding to one community in order to make life unbearable for the other community and so cause them to leave. It's not complicated.

This is not 'ethnic cleansing' any more than laws that instituted women from the workforce after marriage could be considered 'ethnic cleansing'.

That's a really silly comparison.

You are completely trying to re-write history to suit your own narrative. Nobody, nobody! anywhere, anytime has ever concluded that the policies of the Northern apartheid State amounted to ethnic cleansing, or even an attempt to ethnically cleanse the Catholic population. Ditto, the policies of the Southern Free State.

Displacement, discrimination, gerrymandering, the grossly unequal allocation of housing resources etc were deliberate policies aimed at keeping the Catholic population poor and powerless in order to encourage immigration in order to maintain the Protestant majority. That's a policy of coerced removal. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...

The pogroms, sectarian massacares on either side of the border were carried out by elements not associated to those that administered the law.

Tell that to the Catholics families driven out of their homes in Belfast in 1922 or the Shipyard clearances. The term Ethnic Cleansing hadn't been coined in 1922 but the term Pogrom had and that term was used extensively to describe what happened to Catholics in post partition Northern Ireland. A US Commission report at the time compared them to the Russian pogroms against the Jews. The Government there did almost nothing to stop it so was complicit through its inaction.

Why not? There was no rule of law anymore. Parliamentary democracy counted for nothing.

Nonsense. The British Government underwrote the devolved sectarian government in the North and the Government of the Free State still had the weapons the British gave them to win the Civil War.

Irish Unionists threatened Civil War on their neighbours, arming and organising themselves into a militia ready for war, ready to murder.

They threatened war against the British Army and the Forces of the Crown if Home Rule was instituted.

Why wouldn't Nationalists be justified in doing the same, and worse, if need be?

Because it was wrong, had no mandate from their community, was illegal, immoral, self defeating, futile... need i go on?

Perverse logic. The IRA killing civilians prevented a British Minister from releasing civilians who were guilty of nothing?

They were also holding IRA child killing terrorists. We know that because a good number of them were interned.

Instead, they shot down in cold-blood those that protested the policy of interning innocent civilians without charge.

Yep, there was a lot of cold blooded killing on innocent people going on, mostly by the IRA.

How about holding the IRA responsible for their actions, and holding the British government responsible for their actions? They are big boy and girls.

Great idea. I've been encouraging you to do that for a while now. How do you feel about the murdering provisional IRA terrorists, through their proxies in Sinn Fein, running this country? I'm not a fan of the idea in the same way as I wouldn't want Derek Wilford running the country. Though unlike the people who run Sinn Fein he never deliberately and premeditatedly murdered children or pensioners. That's what this thread is about; do we want someone who is a proxy, a figurehead, for the child killing terrorists who spent more than 30 years doing all they could to destroy this State as our head of state?

 

[Sister Sara]

@Purple rather than try define what scholars and academics cannot agree on probably best not to try impose either of our own definitions as being correct, or more correct than the others.

I will concede that the pogroms in the North of the Catholic community there was an abject failure of those in authority and those in law & enforcement to do anything remotely adequate to protect the community would infer a complicity on those individuals who held power and desisted to use it. This is to distinguish against the actual laws in place that would quite clearly point to such actions as burnings etc, as crimes.

Policies of discrimination, intended to exclude, marginalise are tools of those intent on ethnic cleansing but by themselves do not amount to ethnic cleansing.
Policies criminalising same-sex activity were policies of discrimination and marginalisation, but in my opinion fall way short of wanting to ethnically cleanse homosexuals.
Policies excluding women from the workforce after marraige were also discrimintory and marginalising, again it does not equate to ethnic cleansing.
Policies providing preferential treatment to Protestants over Catholics were also discriminatory and marginalising, but not ethnic cleansing.

The Catholic workforce were a cog in the Northern State economy, just as long as they didnt get into positions of political power, or business that could affect political policy.
Same in South Africa, the apartheid regime was bare-faced discriminatory, but black people were needed for the working economy. Ditto the US, and on and on.

As for the Irish Free State, the administrators were intent on facing against the Irregulars to embed their authority, supported by British weapons. Ethnically cleansing Protestants through sectarian massacares such as Dunmanway would not have curried much favour in London that the new Free State was capable of managing its own affairs.
Indeed, the Republican ideology of religious and civil liberty must then, and now, be to fore for any prospective leaders in a UI.

 

[Purple]

Indeed, the Republican ideology of religious and civil liberty must then, and now, be to fore for any prospective leaders in a UI.

Ah here, while it was admirable that Dev did resist the overwhelming political and social pressure to make Roman Catholicism the State religion we were a long way from having anything close to a country which enjoyed religious and civil liberty. The Blue Shirts and their later iterations were far more stanchly Catholic than Dev (as was Michael Collins). The secularisation of this country over the last few decades went in step with shedding the simplistic and childish version of our history which was propagated by the State since independence and is still peddled by the child killers who run Sinn Fein and the Useful Idiots Party members who think they are in a normal political party.

I do accept that some in Sinn Fein have come a long way towards accepting, and even championing, a pluralistic Ireland which embraces both traditions on the island. The late Conor Cruise O'Brien was a very smart man, though he may have gone off his rocker in his latter years, who said that Unionism's best chance for survival as a cultural identity was within a united Ireland. I agree with him. I like to think that if he was still alive (and if he wasn't still terrified of Gerry Adams) Martin McGuinness would be articulating the same views.

 

[Sister Sara]

@Purple you are talking about Dev and Blueshirts now!

Im interested in your assertion that 'we' or 'this State' instituted policies to ethnically cleanse Protestants from the South following partition.

 

[Purple]

@Purple you are talking about Dev and Blueshirts now!
.
Im interested in your assertion that 'we' or 'this State' instituted policies to ethnically cleanse Protestants from the South following partition

I didn't say that we or this State instituted policies to ethnically cleanse Protestants from this country following partition. Firstly this country, Ireland, is not the Free State and secondly not stopping something when you are in charge and have the power to stop it and having policies to actively cause something can often, in effect, be the same thing.


I think we're going around in circles and have taken the thread off topic.
I was attempting to direct it back on track with my latter comment.

I think we are a long way from having a United Ireland. As long as Sinn Fein are a political force in this country and in Northern Ireland the Unionists won't accept unity, and why would they. So Fianna Fail is the only republican party that they'll ever conceivably deal with but their preference would probably be Fine Gael so, ironically, the Party that partitioned the island is the one most likely to unify it.

 

[Sister Sara]

As long as Sinn Fein are a political force in this country and in Northern Ireland the Unionists won't accept unity, and why would they

I remember how vociferous they were about ever sharing power with SF.
But here we are.

SF will never deliver a UI, nor any other political party. What SF may do, if in power North and South, and as the largest political party on the island, is do enough to persuade the British to hold a referendum.

Then it will be up to the people of Ireland, North and South, to determine the outcome of that unity referendum. SF will only be a part-player, not insignificant, but they only a part-player.

We are a long way from that in my opinion.

 

[Howth Head]

Like Sinn Fein (when it comes to their never-ending pronouncements on other, far-away jurisdictions) I prefer the two-state solution.

I like the fact that Northern Ireland is different from the "Free State" I hope it stays that way.

I visit regularly and have long since noted that both sides of the largely overstated divide have more in common with each other than they do with us Southerners/West Brits. (Although it's mainly a country music thing - they're mad for it up there!)

Anyway, will be up there for some of Van Morrison's 80th Birthday concerts in a few weeks time...a few pre-show pints in the Duke of York, The Garrick and Robinsons awaits...