There will come a point in this failed little statelet, when we as a people must come together and vote for the reunification of the entire island of Ireland. When I was young, growing up in the beautiful Glens of Antrim, my dad worked on a friend’s farm. He started early in the morning and finished late at night, as all farmers do. While he liked the work, it was poorly paid and barely paid the bills.
With that said, one of the most painful memories of my childhood was the day my dad had to leave to work in England. I remember my grandfather pulling up at the end of our row of houses in his blue Ford Cortina, putting my dad’s small case into the boot of the car, and taking my dad away. I remember to this day, watching him ignore us waving goodbye to him, all of us in tears as the car disappeared around the bend and out of sight, not to return for over a year. I found out only a few months ago that he wasn’t ignoring us, he was crying and didn’t want us to see him cry. When he eventually got to Hackney, London he rang us from a pay phone to tell us he had arrived and was going to his lodgings. In England, my dad worked on a building site, manual labour for little money, but more than he was making on the farm. He rose to the position of foreman and was still treated like a ‘Paddy’. He had to do this twice until he eventually got a job driving delivery vans as a courier.
Those memories still bring a tear to my eye, even today. The lack of work for Catholics broke up families, led to suicides and death and sent people away from their own country, Ireland, because of oppression, lack of opportunity and sectarianism. Simply put, I don’t want that to be the life forced on any of our families and children, whether Catholic, Protestant, Nationalist, Unionist or Other. We have the opportunity to build an Ireland for everyone. Our downfall until now has been division and the greed of both governments going back as far as An Gorta Mór and forward to present day corruption within the Irish and British governments.
We have been used and abused electorally, time and time again by the British government to fill seats in a government with little to no interest in what happens on this little island. When we have fulfilled our purpose, we are swept under the carpet like an embarrassment until the next time we are required to vote for something, with the only vote mattering, being that towing the Government’s line. Brexit is a very real representation of this. Our brothers and sisters in the South are ruled by a government with the same two parties in place from not long after the inception of the Southern state. Fianna Fail and Fine Gael have made an unmitigated mess of what our Ireland should have been. Mostly it has to be said, to serve their own selfish agenda.
Few, if any corporations pay as much tax as the average citizen, and so Irish citizens are shouldering the entire public purse while corporations are moving billions upon billions of Euros in profits out of the country without paying tax on it. Irish citizens cannot afford a home, either to own or rent due to skyrocketing prices and rent hikes with TDs in the Dail being Landlords or ‘Directors’ in property management companies. Is it any wonder the housing crisis in the South of this island never gets fixed when many of the TD’s supposedly representing the people are landlords? It can only be seen as a conflict of interest for them to be both a TD and a property developer while refusing to freeze or cap rents.
Cronyism is endemic in the Southern government with contracts not being put out to proper tender and brown envelopes being passed about to the extent one could be forgiven for thinking it was a division of An Post. Cronyism such as that of Dr Maitiú Ó Tuathail during the confidential medical files debacle, saying “Leo always delivers” and uploading an image of the secret contract he received from him, clearly marked “Confidential – Not For Circulation”, to an unofficial chat group being used to discuss what should have been official negotiations. Reports of greedy bankers and government involvement with said bankers. Somehow, after the banking crisis, Ireland was lumbered with spending more than 17 other, much larger countries combined. Even Germany and the UK spent less. Is this really the Ireland we want for our kids? Run by the rich for the rich? The 1916 Proclamation granted the average, everyday Irish citizens the ownership of Ireland. Not the rich bankers or the Corporations but ‘We the People’.
“The Irish Republic is entitled to, and hereby claims, the allegiance of every Irishman and Irishwoman. The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all of the children of the nation equally, and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien Government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.” – Paragraph 4 of the 1916 Proclamation.
If we are to have a new Ireland and a new constitution, then paragraph 4 is where we start. Paragraph 4 and its words must be the foundations of the rest of the constitution. Ireland has lost its way in a sort of caste system where the rich and political elite rule the country and everyone else is treated like a lower form of life. We have Irish citizens dying on the very steps of the GPO in Dublin, that sacred place where our struggle for self-determination began and where the 1916 Proclamation was read by Pádraig Pearse flanked by an armed guard. Those leaders dreamed of an Ireland where our people would never be homeless, never mind dying homeless and alone, while the very people who are supposed to ensure their rights are not only TDs but landlords. We deserve better, both North and South, and the first step is true peace and reunification.
“Our freedom must be had at all hazards. If the men of property will not help us, we must fall; we will free ourselves by the aid of that large and respectable class of the community – the men of no property”. – Theobald Wolfe Tone.
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