Image from Belfast Media Group
Most people who read these blogs, particularly Jude’s writings, will be aware that one-time Irish government Minister and commentator Michael McDowell has a lot to say about a united Ireland and border polls – in the negative of course.
Indeed, those who also read the Irish Times will be aware that the traditional unionist publication has been giving Mr McDowell what seems like a free monthly column space over the last year or so to explain to his readers of the mistake of pursuing Irish reunification.
Most of what the former leader of the Progressive Democrats had written on the subject in the past seemed to have focussed on his personal Eoghan Harris-type spite for Sinn Fein, or the Provos as he used to describe the party.
Today however, after watching the unstoppable juggernaut-type mood that’s sweeping across the country around unification, the former minister has begun to understand that the desire for a future border poll is neither owned nor controlled by Sinn Fein, and has accordingly changed his approach in how he intendeds to stop or change people’s thoughts around the matter.
Jude tells us that McDowell is an intelligent man. I’m not wholly convinced of that, but I’m sure Michael McDowell believes he is more intelligent than his Irish Times readers. If a person who is described as intelligent uses that intelligence to promote a political argument they know deep in their hearts is grounded in a falsehood, and if he succeeds in its aims, albeit in the short-term, the result being a continuation of the divisions and pains of the past, is that writer really an intelligent person?
If a so-called intelligent person like Michael McDowell feels, one hundred years after the act of partition, with all the division, sectarism, death and bloodshed that has emanated from that one act, can now argue that Partition shouldn’t be overturned, then is he really an intelligent person? Is he and his writings sincere, and is he really qualified to lecture others on the subject?
Mr McDowell has of late conjured up all sorts of future alternative half-way options to unification which he feels, and hopes might be acceptable to unionism as a resolution to the ancient problem. In this, he neither understands unionism nor his own history. McDowell has already forgotten what divided his own family in our civil war, the Treaty which some argued was only temporary like partition itself – a stepping-stone to eventual unity. Now here we are a hundred years on and thousands of deaths later and the former minister is talking about another stepping-stone alternative to unity.
So, the former head Progressive Democrat wants us to ditch the idea of democracy that is legislated for in the Good Friday Agreement, which says a majority will decide when Irish Unity comes about? How intelligent of him. Not only is McDowell through his writings, not very interested in the opinions and feelings of anyone who might aspire to Irish reunification, or who had suffered because of partition, but just as his like-minded pen-pal Eoghan Harris, he has only one audience in mind, and just look at how much Harris has failed unionism.
People can debate about how intelligent Michael McDowell really is, but I would have far more respect for him, if he displayed some honesty and backbone and came out as a believer in the cause of unionism, because ultimately, anyone who displays such talent and energy for defending the maintenance of Partition, cannot truly be described as anything else!
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