Mary-Lou "United Ireland is within touching distance"

Sister Sara said:
There were instituted policies of exclusion and discrimination.
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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.
Sister Sara said:
This is not 'ethnic cleansing' any more than laws that instituted women from the workforce after marriage could be considered 'ethnic cleansing'.
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That's a really silly comparison.
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...
Sister Sara said:
The pogroms, sectarian massacares on either side of the border were carried out by elements not associated to those that administered the law.
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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.
Sister Sara said:
Why not? There was no rule of law anymore. Parliamentary democracy counted for nothing.
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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.
Sister Sara said:
Irish Unionists threatened Civil War on their neighbours, arming and organising themselves into a militia ready for war, ready to murder.
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They threatened war against the British Army and the Forces of the Crown if Home Rule was instituted.
Sister Sara said:
Why wouldn't Nationalists be justified in doing the same, and worse, if need be?
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Because it was wrong, had no mandate from their community, was illegal, immoral, self defeating, futile... need i go on?
Sister Sara said:
Perverse logic. The IRA killing civilians prevented a British Minister from releasing civilians who were guilty of nothing?
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They were also holding IRA child killing terrorists. We know that because a good number of them were interned.
Sister Sara said:
Instead, they shot down in cold-blood those that protested the policy of interning innocent civilians without charge.
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Yep, there was a lot of cold blooded killing on innocent people going on, mostly by the IRA.

Sister Sara said:
How about holding the IRA responsible for their actions, and holding the British government responsible for their actions? They are big boy and girls.
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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?
 
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@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.
 
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Sister Sara said:
Indeed, the Republican ideology of religious and civil liberty must then, and now, be to fore for any prospective leaders in a UI.
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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.
 
@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.
 
Sister Sara said:
@Purple you are talking about Dev and Blueshirts now!
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Im interested in your assertion that 'we' or 'this State' instituted policies to ethnically cleanse Protestants from the South following partition
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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.
 
Purple said:
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
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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.
 
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...
 
Sure, but if Sinn Fein are in power in the North ad in this country it is significantly less likely that the Unionists will for a united Ireland.
Before any of that happens we'll all have to know what we are voting for, what this new country will look like, how it will be structured, how tied it will be to Britain etc. It can't be like Brexit or some meaningless aspirational nonsense.


Sister Sara said:
We are a long way from that in my opinion.
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I agree, a couple of generations at least.
Sister Sara said:
I remember how vociferous they were about ever sharing power with SF.
But here we are.
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Neither side has any real power in Northern Ireland. They run a glorified County Council. Putting the Shinners in charge of a sovereign State is a completely different thing. Having talked to people involved in public administration and the administration of justice in Northern Ireland the impression I get is that the levels of corruption there are off the charts. That alone would give me significant pause to vote for unity.
 
Visiting a D Day Victory museum in Normandy. An interesting clip tells of how the locals were continually bombed even when the Germans had been pushed out. And I am sure that some Allied soldiers did a bit of R&P. Yet the overall tone is one of wholesome gratitude for the liberation.
Hundreds of British soldiers lost their lives to keep the two NI communities and indeed the whole island from tearing itself to pieces. Yet no call for a memorial of gratitude to them either in Belfast or Dublin. Just saying.
 
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The Allies killed between 13,000 and 15,000 civilians on D-Day, mainly around Caen. It was the single worst day of the war for deaths of French civilians. It's estimated that in total the Allies killed around 68,000 French people during the war but the Germans killed over 280,000. The Red Cross estimated that 100,000 were killed by the Germans in 1940 alone, mainly by attacking fleeing civilians.
Most of the rape took place in Germany where it's estimated that one in three German women between 15 and 75 were raped by allied soldiers.

Duke of Marmalade said:
Hundreds of British soldiers lost their lives to keep the two NI communities and indeed the whole island from tearing itself to pieces. Yet no call for a memorial of gratitude to them either in Belfast or Dublin. Just saying
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We can't even list the dead from 1916, the War of Independence, and the Irish Civil War on a wall in Glasnevin Cemetery without it being vandalised.
 
Sister Sara said:
Let me rephrase so - I remember how vociferous Unionists were against ever sharing a glorified county council with SF. But here we are.
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Yes, and in the 1980's they were against the Anglo-Irish Agreement. Every 40 years or so they take a small step forwards. Their Deputy First Minister should be the leader of the Party or even the Deputy Leader but instead they nominated a woman who was co-opted into her seat when Jeffrey Donaldson declined to take it due to his, em, personal issues. That said Emma Little-Pengelly has a remarkably similar family background to Michelle O'Neill.
The DUP's participation in the Assembly is obstructionist and self serving and in no way shows any movement towards accepting the reality of the democratic wished of the people of Northern Ireland.
 
SF keep calling for a UI referendum. The UK Govt says they will hold one if they believe it will succeed in NI. How exactly they judge that has not really been spelled out, and sounds like a woolly 'kick it down the road' cop-out.

SF know this but it keeps their base happy continually pressing for one. They've never really said what they would do if their bluff was called and it was actually defeated. I'm sure they would accept the democratic will of the people.......
 
There are two prospective ways to a UI, or, and it should not be discounted - a NI with the ideology of Irish unification permanently dead in the water.

Either could be achieved through an organic, generational one where the political, social and economic compass induces a level of pragmatism from all quarters that heralds a peaceful unification/permanent partition that finally bins the sectarian divide that has blighted this island for centuries.

This is multi-generational, and not without setbacks.

Or, and more likely in my opinion, a disruptive and potentially violent unification/permanent partition.

This will be brought about most likely, imo, with a break-up of GB through either with Scottish, and/or Welsh independence. Both countries have independence movements, and there is also an English Independence movement. Without GB, NI is standing on eggshells and will quickly fall.

As is stands, all, including Irish movements for full independence, are decades if not light years away.
However, political seismic revolution is more volcanic than pragmatic. At once, all is benign and dormant, then for whatever reasons or whatever forces of nature bring, all hell may break loose (such as a breakup of GB).

This is obviously the least desirable but history tells us, here and all over the world that is sadly a greater probability to either unite Ireland or permanently enshrine NI into long-lasting, accepted, and non-sectarian entity.

It may involve the wholesale slaughter of one people over the other.

Interestingly, as a side, when I hear the debate about whether Ireland should join NATO and beef up our defence forces and stop relying on the RAF to protect our skies, I never hear much about why the British are content to spend their taxes for 'our' benefit.

There is a simple reason. For centuries Ireland has been considered by Britain as a back door to attack by foreign enemies.

A beefed-up Irish soldiery, airforce and navy, would mean the British forces would no longer rule the waves (and skies) over Ireland. Worse, should a militarily beefed-up Irish ever fall into the hands revolutionary Republic, the sleeping dog of the 6 counties may surely awaken?

Best leave the Brits to do what we should do. Call it a token debt of gratitude for centuries of calamities.

We can spend our money on better things like education and health and maybe induce that organic unification in time.
 
@Purple I'll take that as a compliment as its up against some strong competition!

The heal of the hunt is while MLMcD is talking about "touching distance" it is bluster to tickle the tummys of her base. And while not unimportant, others talking about anthems and flags is just periphery.

The real test is defence and security. Depending on the position of the Irish government of the day will determine if there will be a referendum. If Ireland should fall into the hands of more hardline socialist republicans with perhaps stronger ties to Russia and/or China, the Brits, supported by the US simply will not facilitate a referendum even if the polls would support such a referendum passing north and south.
 
Sister Sara said:
The heal of the hunt is while MLMcD is talking about "touching distance" it is bluster to tickle the tummys of her base. And while not unimportant, others talking about anthems and flags is just periphery.
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I agree.

Sister Sara said:
The real test is defence and security.
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I think the real test is economic.
I agree with that too and I think they'd be correct to do so.
 
Purple said:
I think the real test is economic.
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In determining the outcome of the referendum, more so, yes.

In determining whether a referendum should be facilitated in first place, defence and security, internally and externally.

There is reasonable cause to believe that a referendum would fan the flames of loyalist extremists.
There is also growing threat from dissident Republicans that see the GFA as maintaining the Unionist veto, ergo, the right to establish the Republic (1916) through arms is still legitimate in their view.

Externally, Britain is quite comfortable manning our skies and waters as it serves their own national interest for their own defence too.
 
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