Unionists have now manoeuvred themselves increasingly ridiculous position where their new enemy is the British Government who have become, for them, the next new reason for not engaging in political co-operation with the neighbours on their island. They cry foul in their jingoistic anthems of the Motherland’s vain impotence at a full square-go at the mythical unaware enemy of the bogeyman of the EU (incognito Dublin). This of course is not a new concept to anyone who knows the historical positioning of unionism over the last 150 years. There is nothing new about unionism threatening to Out-British the British – they have a long history of that. What is new though is that they do this from a position of weakness, a position where their in-built majority has disappeared, a position where their archaic emblems and symbols have become irrelevant and where their own community have begun a momentum to reject them. It is not that the community that they say they represent is irrelevant- more that the representation that they espouse is increasingly irrelevant for that community. It is this momentum, in tandem with an increased confidence within nationalists in the north combined with a new realisation of the south, that is making change inevitable in the short term In Ireland. We’ve not gone away, you know.
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