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Packy Carty ✒ Andy Burnham’s announcement that a border poll is “off the table” — while not surprising — further underscores the undemocratic nature of British rule in Ireland and the denial of Irish national self-determination by yet the latest British Prime Minister, whose government ironically has yet to be approved by a British general election.


 
However, this latest dismissal cannot hide the material reality that the artificially constructed Northern Irish state is on borrowed time.

Contrived to maintain a permanent unionist majority, the inversion of that majority remains the most subversive force the status quo has ever known.

Unionism, in its intransigent desperation, pushed all-in on Brexit in the hope that the rising tide could be stopped through the imposition of a hard border. Instead, the imposition of the sea border rocked Unionism to its core and revealed Whitehall's true hand. They set the North outside their sovereign referendum and, for the first time in British history, signed an international treaty conceding that Northern Ireland is not, apparently, as British as Finchley!

This decision, more than any other, exposes the British position as a long, slow disengagement — effectively conceding the Provisionals’ "declaration of intent to withdraw."
 
Burnham won't be the Prime Minister who makes that final call, and he knew it when he brushed aside the question. For while the new majority has already been born, it still has a decade to mature.

⏩ Packy Carty is an East Tyrone Socialist Republican. 

On Borrowed Time

Packy Carty ✒ Andy Burnham’s announcement that a border poll is “off the table” — while not surprising — further underscores the undemocratic nature of British rule in Ireland and the denial of Irish national self-determination by yet the latest British Prime Minister, whose government ironically has yet to be approved by a British general election.


 
However, this latest dismissal cannot hide the material reality that the artificially constructed Northern Irish state is on borrowed time.

Contrived to maintain a permanent unionist majority, the inversion of that majority remains the most subversive force the status quo has ever known.

Unionism, in its intransigent desperation, pushed all-in on Brexit in the hope that the rising tide could be stopped through the imposition of a hard border. Instead, the imposition of the sea border rocked Unionism to its core and revealed Whitehall's true hand. They set the North outside their sovereign referendum and, for the first time in British history, signed an international treaty conceding that Northern Ireland is not, apparently, as British as Finchley!

This decision, more than any other, exposes the British position as a long, slow disengagement — effectively conceding the Provisionals’ "declaration of intent to withdraw."
 
Burnham won't be the Prime Minister who makes that final call, and he knew it when he brushed aside the question. For while the new majority has already been born, it still has a decade to mature.

⏩ Packy Carty is an East Tyrone Socialist Republican. 
Andy Burnham Irish Border Poll Packy Carty

1 comment:

  1. AM11:40 AM, August 30, 2026

    This is a rare occasion of nuance in the thinking of anti-GFA republicans - a departure from the screaming which has come to saturate much republican discourse.
    I think where it goes off the track a bit is in claiming that the British are effectively conceding the Provo declaration of intent to withdraw. A comparison may be made with a hit man claiming to have secured his objective because his intended target died at 90 from natural causes.
    The Provo objective was to both coerce the British out of Ireland and to subvert the principle of unity only by consent.
    Rather than the British giving into the demand for a declaration of intent to withdraw they have adhered to their own strategic objective not of remaining in Ireland forever but of leaving Ireland only when they had the consent of a majority in the North.
    The GFA was a British declaration of intent to stay until that consent was secured. The British position has not changed in the slightest - the Provo position has been turned on its head. The objective of unity by coercion failed and the Provos now accept unity only by consent.
    We can debate the merits and wisdom of the Provo position but that is how best in my view to describe it.
    As always, Packy, good to get your take.

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