It occurred to me recently that for the first time since the “FLIGHT OF THE EARLS” in 1607 the aboriginal population of Ulster have any say whatever in the government of most of their province.
They owe this primarily not to any good will of British rulers or the prayers or moralistic sermons of Bishops in Ireland or Rome.
The late Seamus Mallon sneered that the Good Friday Agreement which Sinn Fein signed in 1998 was the (1973) Sunningdale Agreement for Slow Learners.
Scandalised when Tony Blair talked to Sinn Fein, Mallon asked him to justify himself. Blair explained that the republicans had guns.
,The IRA had withstood all that Britain and its collaborators could throw at them for nearly 30 years, and Sinn Fein won the support of most of the Nationalist community.
Together they had achieved more than their predecessors in 1921 and Hugh O’Neill and Red Hugh O’Donnell combined in the nine years war four centuries earlier.
Nonetheless I fear that if all the parties, and all the elected legislators in Leinster House and Stormont determined to establish a united sovereign democratic all-Ireland Republic that Britain would, as usual, waive the rules. Her statecraft mirrors Mae West’s Diamonds. Goodness has nothing to do with it. Even the Koh I Noor, the largest Diamond in the Crown was stolen by the Brits.
In 1949 the Fine Gael -led coalition in Dublin labelled the State a Republic, the British Prime Minister noted a memorandum from the the Cabinet Secretary stating that, for strategic reasons, some part of Ireland should remain within His Majesty’s Dominions.
Attlee was busy building Nato which is today complicit in genocide in Gaza and propping up the fascist regime in Ukraine.
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