I don't buy into the border poll mania that has infected the discussion about the journey to an Irish Republic. I don't believe a border poll offers a solution to the more pressing political, social and economic problems we face. It will never bring the Republic. I don't believe the British government will call one in the foreseeable future and, even if it did, I don't believe we are remotely close to a majority capable of winning it.
That does not mean the questions raised by Louth Forever should be dismissed. Quite the opposite. The discussions being generated in TPQ are the discussions that those who claim ownership of the New Ireland debate should be having. They cannot and will not.
The Vice 🪶 Everyone Can Name The Problem 🪶 Nobody Will Pay For The Answer is another challenging and insightful contribution to that discussion, and, even for those of us sceptical of the current obsession with border polls, it poses a question that goes considerably beyond the mechanics of calling one.
What are those who advocate constitutional change actually prepared to give in order to achieve it?
I found the distinction between an “ask” and a “remedy” particularly pertinent. It is relatively easy to identify what Britain should do, what unionism should concede, what Dublin should prepare for or what the Secretary of State should clarify. It is considerably more difficult to identify what those advocating constitutional change are themselves prepared to concede, surrender or pay in order to achieve it.
There is, however, another question which perhaps precedes even that one.
Who has been paying the cost until now?
Louth Forever's reference to Michelle O'Neill and the prospect of nurses taking industrial action is perhaps the perfect example. Nurses in the North are once again demanding pay parity with their colleagues in Britain. There is a particular irony in O'Neill now blaming the British and warning of the consequences of decisions she herself took as Minister for Health.
Those inside the room still make the decisions. Those outside it still pay the cost.
And perhaps that is where any serious discussion about cost has to begin. Before asking what republicans, nationalists or unionists might have to concede in some hypothetical future settlement, we should acknowledge that the political arrangements of the past three decades have already carried a price. We need to acknowledge that those who have benefited most from those arrangements have not been the people who paid for it.
The Fleadh meant different things to different people
I don't wish to get into semantics about the Fleadh itself. The return of the northern Assembly this week saw both the DUP and Sinn Féin claim its success as vindication of their respective political positions. Both are wrong. It was a magnificent victory for all the people who call Ireland home.
I deliberately pitched my original comments on the Fleadh in constitutional terms. Any line of reasoning which assumes that Irish nationalists somehow have ownership of Irish culture in all its manifestations makes me uncomfortable. Likewise, the contention that allowing “others” access to that culture constitutes inclusion. It does not.
Irish traditional music, song, dance and culture do not belong to nationalist Ireland. Culture is multidimensional and complex, and Protestant Ireland and unionist Ireland have shaped our shared culture to the same extent as Catholic or nationalist Ireland.
A Protestant playing Irish traditional music is therefore not being generously admitted into somebody else's culture. It is his culture too. The very suggestion that nationalist Ireland somehow owns Irish culture and can then demonstrate its inclusivity by allowing others to participate in it perpetuates the division we claim to be trying to overcome.
Isn't that part of how we ended up in this mess in the first place?
For me, that was the real significance of the Fleadh. It wasn't nationalist Ireland demonstrating that it could accommodate British or unionist identity. It was people from multiple traditions participating in a culture that belongs to all of them equally. They are not being included. They are already part of it.
As Louth Forever argues, that becomes a much more difficult proposition when we move from culture to constitutional politics. The fact remains that the Fleadh was held in the United Kingdom. I deliberately made that point in my original piece because my argument was constitutional, not cultural.
My contention is that, in the post-GFA North, most of the grievances which fuelled the civil rights movement have been addressed. The northern state in which Irishness was once regarded with suspicion, and its outward expression routinely met with hostility, has changed considerably. Irish language, music, sport and culture can now be expressed openly in this part of the United Kingdom in ways that would have been almost unimaginable to earlier generations.
That was precisely my point about the Fleadh. Its success does not demonstrate that the constitutional question has been resolved in favour of Irish unity. If anything, it demonstrates something rather more uncomfortable for republicans, and that is the North has become considerably better at accommodating Irishness.
None of that makes the North less Irish. Nor does it make the Union desirable. But it does remove many of the everyday cultural and political grievances which once made the northern state intolerable to a substantial section of its population.
And that matters enormously when we move from culture to constitutional politics. If people can live openly as Irish, speak Irish, play Irish music, attend the Fleadh, follow the GAA and carry an Irish passport while remaining constitutionally within the United Kingdom, then cultural Irishness cannot itself provide the argument for constitutional change.
Something more has to be offered, and that, I think, is where Louth Forever's challenge really begins to bite.
If a different constitutional future is ever to be constructed, people from the Protestant and unionist tradition cannot simply be invited into a project designed by nationalists and republicans and presented with a list of guarantees about how generously they will be treated. They have to co-design the project.
They are not guests in Ireland. They are not planters. They are the co-owners of Ireland.
And that brings us back to Louth Forever's question about cost.
A guarantee which costs us nothing is not much of a guarantee. Would republicans, for example, be prepared to defend the right of an Orange parade to walk along the Garvaghy Road?
I have previously questioned, in Remembering, how the issue of remembrance might be dealt with in a new Ireland. Whose dead would be remembered, how would they be remembered, and would we be prepared to accord legitimacy to forms of remembrance which make us deeply uncomfortable?
These are not peripheral questions. They go directly to Louth Forever's argument about cost.
Is there an appetite to pay these costs to secure a new Ireland? More fundamentally, are these discussions even taking place?
I choose these examples precisely because they are uncomfortable. There is little value in demonstrating our tolerance by promising to protect only those things with which we already agree.
If the guarantees offered to unionists require nothing of nationalists and republicans beyond accepting things they already find acceptable, then very little has actually been guaranteed. The real test comes when protecting somebody else's identity, tradition or rights requires us to accept something we would rather not.
That is when a new Ireland begins to carry a cost.
But there is another potential cost, and for Sinn Féin it may be considerably greater.
It may have to give up ownership of the unity project.
In The 2% Club, I hypothesise on the early writings of Gerry Adams and, in particular, The Politics of Irish Freedom. The political strategy articulated by Adams in the 1980s was not simply about making Sinn Féin sufficiently large that it could deliver Irish unity on everybody else's behalf. The objective was to help create a mass political and social movement that extended far beyond Sinn Féin itself.
The objective was not to build a mass Sinn Féin. It was to build a mass movement for radical change.
Almost forty years later, for those who remain predisposed to building the Republic, perhaps the remedy remains that original objective. It simply needs to be rediscovered.
Personally, these days, I am more predisposed to gardening, but the point remains.
Sinn Féin has built Sinn Féin. What it has not built is that mass movement.
A genuine mass movement for radical change cannot simply be Sinn Féin with a few extra chairs around the table. It must not be “Irelands Future” mark two.
That is why I fundamentally disagree with Declan Kearney's proposal for a forum bringing together what he describes as “Irish national democratic opinion”.
I understand the thinking behind it, but his language draws me back to the Free State/Brit isolationist policies of the 1970s and 1980s. It begins by defining who is entitled to participate and, by implication, who is not.
Not only does his proposal exclude republicans who fall outside his definition of acceptable “national democratic opinion”, it excludes a significant section of the population who do not consider themselves Irish at all.
Declan, it appears, has already decided what constitutes acceptable “national democratic opinion”.
Democrats and nice people are welcome.
People like me, presumably, need not apply.
But neither, presumably, need many of the people whose participation would actually be essential if constitutional change is ever to command majority support in the North.
That seems to me precisely the wrong starting point. You cannot build a genuinely national movement by first deciding which parts of the nation are entitled to participate in it.
It would necessarily have to include constitutional nationalists, republicans who rejected the Provisional settlement, socialists, social democrats, conservatives, independents and people with no particular party allegiance at all.
More importantly, it would have to include people from the Protestant and unionist tradition who are prepared to contemplate a discussion about constitutional change without first being required to become nationalists or republicans. Unionism cannot simply be invited into somebody else's project. They have to co-design it.
And that means Sinn Féin giving up something considerably more difficult than another political concession. Control.
Such a movement would therefore have to be independent of Sinn Féin. It would have to be capable of disagreeing with Sinn Féin and, when necessary, telling Sinn Féin no.
If the objective is radical constitutional change rather than the continued electoral advancement of Sinn Féin, there may come a point at which the interests of the party and the interests of the wider project diverge. At that point, Sinn Féin would then have to decide which matters more.
Border Poll Mania
As I have already said, I don't share the faux enthusiasm for a Border Poll. But Sinn Féin does, and it has accepted the constitutional mechanism through which such a poll would be triggered by signing up to the GFA in 1998. It therefore seems reasonable to examine the argument on Sinn Féin's own terms.
I hold an unorthodox view on Sinn Féin's increasingly insistent demands for a border poll. My belief is that the demand owes rather more to the limitations of the Provisional strategy than to any serious expectation that a referendum is imminent.
There is nowhere else left for the Provos to go.
The IRA ended its campaign without achieving its stated objective, it decommissioned its weapons. Sinn Féin simultaneously accepted the consent principle and entered the institutions of the GFA.
Sinn Féin has become the largest party in the North, holds the office of First Minister and has achieved levels of electoral support across Ireland that would have been unimaginable when the strategy was first developed.
Yet none of that, in itself, has brought Irish unity any closer. Under the mechanism Sinn Féin accepted in 1998, the determining factor is not how large Sinn Féin becomes but whether a majority in the North can be persuaded to vote for constitutional change.
The border poll has become the final destination of a Sinn Féin strategy where all other options have been closed down.
Additionally, there is something remarkably cost-free about demanding a border poll when you are reasonably confident that the British government will say no. Sinn Féin demands one, the British refuse, and Sinn Féin can point to that refusal as further evidence of British obstruction. As Dixie would say, keeping the deluded happy.
But what if the British said yes?
Suddenly the cost to Sinn Féin becomes very real.
Sinn Féin would have to fight the referendum it has spent years demanding, and it would have to win it. A defeat would not simply postpone Irish unity for another few years. It would call into question the entire strategic trajectory through which the compromises of the past four decades have been justified.
The potential cost to Sinn Féin would be existential.
This makes the continuing argument about the criteria for calling a border poll even more perplexing.
The party repeatedly demands that the British government clarify the criteria by which a Secretary of State would determine that the threshold for calling a referendum had been reached.
Perhaps Sinn Féin and its proxies should answer the question itself. What evidence would persuade Sinn Féin that the criterion it signed up to in 1998 has actually been met?
Opinion polls? If so, what percentage and sustained for how long?
Election results? If so, which votes constitute votes for unity?
Demographic change? If so, why should religious or community background be assumed to determine constitutional preference?
Or some combination of these?
Before asking the British once more to tell us what evidence would persuade them that a majority exists, Comrade Kearney should tell us what evidence would persuade Sinn Féin.
But there is a cost attached to doing that also. Once Sinn Féin states its own benchmark, its rhetoric of momentum becomes publicly measurable.
And what happens if Sinn Féin's own reasonable test tells us what most numerate people already suspect: that the majority required to win a border poll simply does not exist?
Then the central strategic question is no longer why the British government will not call a referendum. It is much more difficult, and it is being played out in Scotland as we speak.
How do you create a majority for unity in the North?
To Conclude
This is where Louth Forever's argument ultimately takes me. Not towards another demand upon Britain. Not towards another timetable for a border poll. And certainly not towards another Sinn Féin initiative designed to demonstrate that Irish unity is just around the corner.
It takes me back to the question of cost.
Who has paid until now and who has benefited?
What are those who have benefited most prepared to surrender if achieving their stated objective requires it?
Republicans may have to surrender some old assumptions about ownership of Irishness. We may have to make guarantees which genuinely cost us something.
And Sinn Féin may ultimately have to surrender something it has spent forty years acquiring: ownership and leadership of the unity project.
If the mass movement envisaged all those years ago is ever to exist, it cannot belong to Sinn Féin. It should not even be a republican movement. Sinn Féin can participate in it. It can argue within it. It can contribute enormously to building it. But it cannot own it.
Sometimes leadership is about knowing when it is time to stop leading.
That does not mean the questions raised by Louth Forever should be dismissed. Quite the opposite. The discussions being generated in TPQ are the discussions that those who claim ownership of the New Ireland debate should be having. They cannot and will not.
The Vice 🪶 Everyone Can Name The Problem 🪶 Nobody Will Pay For The Answer is another challenging and insightful contribution to that discussion, and, even for those of us sceptical of the current obsession with border polls, it poses a question that goes considerably beyond the mechanics of calling one.
What are those who advocate constitutional change actually prepared to give in order to achieve it?
I found the distinction between an “ask” and a “remedy” particularly pertinent. It is relatively easy to identify what Britain should do, what unionism should concede, what Dublin should prepare for or what the Secretary of State should clarify. It is considerably more difficult to identify what those advocating constitutional change are themselves prepared to concede, surrender or pay in order to achieve it.
There is, however, another question which perhaps precedes even that one.
Who has been paying the cost until now?
Louth Forever's reference to Michelle O'Neill and the prospect of nurses taking industrial action is perhaps the perfect example. Nurses in the North are once again demanding pay parity with their colleagues in Britain. There is a particular irony in O'Neill now blaming the British and warning of the consequences of decisions she herself took as Minister for Health.
Those inside the room still make the decisions. Those outside it still pay the cost.
And perhaps that is where any serious discussion about cost has to begin. Before asking what republicans, nationalists or unionists might have to concede in some hypothetical future settlement, we should acknowledge that the political arrangements of the past three decades have already carried a price. We need to acknowledge that those who have benefited most from those arrangements have not been the people who paid for it.
The Fleadh meant different things to different people
I don't wish to get into semantics about the Fleadh itself. The return of the northern Assembly this week saw both the DUP and Sinn Féin claim its success as vindication of their respective political positions. Both are wrong. It was a magnificent victory for all the people who call Ireland home.
I deliberately pitched my original comments on the Fleadh in constitutional terms. Any line of reasoning which assumes that Irish nationalists somehow have ownership of Irish culture in all its manifestations makes me uncomfortable. Likewise, the contention that allowing “others” access to that culture constitutes inclusion. It does not.
Irish traditional music, song, dance and culture do not belong to nationalist Ireland. Culture is multidimensional and complex, and Protestant Ireland and unionist Ireland have shaped our shared culture to the same extent as Catholic or nationalist Ireland.
A Protestant playing Irish traditional music is therefore not being generously admitted into somebody else's culture. It is his culture too. The very suggestion that nationalist Ireland somehow owns Irish culture and can then demonstrate its inclusivity by allowing others to participate in it perpetuates the division we claim to be trying to overcome.
Isn't that part of how we ended up in this mess in the first place?
For me, that was the real significance of the Fleadh. It wasn't nationalist Ireland demonstrating that it could accommodate British or unionist identity. It was people from multiple traditions participating in a culture that belongs to all of them equally. They are not being included. They are already part of it.
As Louth Forever argues, that becomes a much more difficult proposition when we move from culture to constitutional politics. The fact remains that the Fleadh was held in the United Kingdom. I deliberately made that point in my original piece because my argument was constitutional, not cultural.
My contention is that, in the post-GFA North, most of the grievances which fuelled the civil rights movement have been addressed. The northern state in which Irishness was once regarded with suspicion, and its outward expression routinely met with hostility, has changed considerably. Irish language, music, sport and culture can now be expressed openly in this part of the United Kingdom in ways that would have been almost unimaginable to earlier generations.
That was precisely my point about the Fleadh. Its success does not demonstrate that the constitutional question has been resolved in favour of Irish unity. If anything, it demonstrates something rather more uncomfortable for republicans, and that is the North has become considerably better at accommodating Irishness.
None of that makes the North less Irish. Nor does it make the Union desirable. But it does remove many of the everyday cultural and political grievances which once made the northern state intolerable to a substantial section of its population.
And that matters enormously when we move from culture to constitutional politics. If people can live openly as Irish, speak Irish, play Irish music, attend the Fleadh, follow the GAA and carry an Irish passport while remaining constitutionally within the United Kingdom, then cultural Irishness cannot itself provide the argument for constitutional change.
Something more has to be offered, and that, I think, is where Louth Forever's challenge really begins to bite.
If a different constitutional future is ever to be constructed, people from the Protestant and unionist tradition cannot simply be invited into a project designed by nationalists and republicans and presented with a list of guarantees about how generously they will be treated. They have to co-design the project.
They are not guests in Ireland. They are not planters. They are the co-owners of Ireland.
And that brings us back to Louth Forever's question about cost.
A guarantee which costs us nothing is not much of a guarantee. Would republicans, for example, be prepared to defend the right of an Orange parade to walk along the Garvaghy Road?
I have previously questioned, in Remembering, how the issue of remembrance might be dealt with in a new Ireland. Whose dead would be remembered, how would they be remembered, and would we be prepared to accord legitimacy to forms of remembrance which make us deeply uncomfortable?
These are not peripheral questions. They go directly to Louth Forever's argument about cost.
Is there an appetite to pay these costs to secure a new Ireland? More fundamentally, are these discussions even taking place?
I choose these examples precisely because they are uncomfortable. There is little value in demonstrating our tolerance by promising to protect only those things with which we already agree.
If the guarantees offered to unionists require nothing of nationalists and republicans beyond accepting things they already find acceptable, then very little has actually been guaranteed. The real test comes when protecting somebody else's identity, tradition or rights requires us to accept something we would rather not.
That is when a new Ireland begins to carry a cost.
But there is another potential cost, and for Sinn Féin it may be considerably greater.
It may have to give up ownership of the unity project.
In The 2% Club, I hypothesise on the early writings of Gerry Adams and, in particular, The Politics of Irish Freedom. The political strategy articulated by Adams in the 1980s was not simply about making Sinn Féin sufficiently large that it could deliver Irish unity on everybody else's behalf. The objective was to help create a mass political and social movement that extended far beyond Sinn Féin itself.
The objective was not to build a mass Sinn Féin. It was to build a mass movement for radical change.
Almost forty years later, for those who remain predisposed to building the Republic, perhaps the remedy remains that original objective. It simply needs to be rediscovered.
Personally, these days, I am more predisposed to gardening, but the point remains.
Sinn Féin has built Sinn Féin. What it has not built is that mass movement.
A genuine mass movement for radical change cannot simply be Sinn Féin with a few extra chairs around the table. It must not be “Irelands Future” mark two.
That is why I fundamentally disagree with Declan Kearney's proposal for a forum bringing together what he describes as “Irish national democratic opinion”.
I understand the thinking behind it, but his language draws me back to the Free State/Brit isolationist policies of the 1970s and 1980s. It begins by defining who is entitled to participate and, by implication, who is not.
Not only does his proposal exclude republicans who fall outside his definition of acceptable “national democratic opinion”, it excludes a significant section of the population who do not consider themselves Irish at all.
Declan, it appears, has already decided what constitutes acceptable “national democratic opinion”.
Democrats and nice people are welcome.
People like me, presumably, need not apply.
But neither, presumably, need many of the people whose participation would actually be essential if constitutional change is ever to command majority support in the North.
That seems to me precisely the wrong starting point. You cannot build a genuinely national movement by first deciding which parts of the nation are entitled to participate in it.
It would necessarily have to include constitutional nationalists, republicans who rejected the Provisional settlement, socialists, social democrats, conservatives, independents and people with no particular party allegiance at all.
More importantly, it would have to include people from the Protestant and unionist tradition who are prepared to contemplate a discussion about constitutional change without first being required to become nationalists or republicans. Unionism cannot simply be invited into somebody else's project. They have to co-design it.
And that means Sinn Féin giving up something considerably more difficult than another political concession. Control.
Such a movement would therefore have to be independent of Sinn Féin. It would have to be capable of disagreeing with Sinn Féin and, when necessary, telling Sinn Féin no.
If the objective is radical constitutional change rather than the continued electoral advancement of Sinn Féin, there may come a point at which the interests of the party and the interests of the wider project diverge. At that point, Sinn Féin would then have to decide which matters more.
Border Poll Mania
As I have already said, I don't share the faux enthusiasm for a Border Poll. But Sinn Féin does, and it has accepted the constitutional mechanism through which such a poll would be triggered by signing up to the GFA in 1998. It therefore seems reasonable to examine the argument on Sinn Féin's own terms.
I hold an unorthodox view on Sinn Féin's increasingly insistent demands for a border poll. My belief is that the demand owes rather more to the limitations of the Provisional strategy than to any serious expectation that a referendum is imminent.
There is nowhere else left for the Provos to go.
The IRA ended its campaign without achieving its stated objective, it decommissioned its weapons. Sinn Féin simultaneously accepted the consent principle and entered the institutions of the GFA.
Sinn Féin has become the largest party in the North, holds the office of First Minister and has achieved levels of electoral support across Ireland that would have been unimaginable when the strategy was first developed.
Yet none of that, in itself, has brought Irish unity any closer. Under the mechanism Sinn Féin accepted in 1998, the determining factor is not how large Sinn Féin becomes but whether a majority in the North can be persuaded to vote for constitutional change.
The border poll has become the final destination of a Sinn Féin strategy where all other options have been closed down.
Additionally, there is something remarkably cost-free about demanding a border poll when you are reasonably confident that the British government will say no. Sinn Féin demands one, the British refuse, and Sinn Féin can point to that refusal as further evidence of British obstruction. As Dixie would say, keeping the deluded happy.
But what if the British said yes?
Suddenly the cost to Sinn Féin becomes very real.
Sinn Féin would have to fight the referendum it has spent years demanding, and it would have to win it. A defeat would not simply postpone Irish unity for another few years. It would call into question the entire strategic trajectory through which the compromises of the past four decades have been justified.
The potential cost to Sinn Féin would be existential.
This makes the continuing argument about the criteria for calling a border poll even more perplexing.
The party repeatedly demands that the British government clarify the criteria by which a Secretary of State would determine that the threshold for calling a referendum had been reached.
Perhaps Sinn Féin and its proxies should answer the question itself. What evidence would persuade Sinn Féin that the criterion it signed up to in 1998 has actually been met?
Opinion polls? If so, what percentage and sustained for how long?
Election results? If so, which votes constitute votes for unity?
Demographic change? If so, why should religious or community background be assumed to determine constitutional preference?
Or some combination of these?
Before asking the British once more to tell us what evidence would persuade them that a majority exists, Comrade Kearney should tell us what evidence would persuade Sinn Féin.
But there is a cost attached to doing that also. Once Sinn Féin states its own benchmark, its rhetoric of momentum becomes publicly measurable.
And what happens if Sinn Féin's own reasonable test tells us what most numerate people already suspect: that the majority required to win a border poll simply does not exist?
Then the central strategic question is no longer why the British government will not call a referendum. It is much more difficult, and it is being played out in Scotland as we speak.
How do you create a majority for unity in the North?
To Conclude
This is where Louth Forever's argument ultimately takes me. Not towards another demand upon Britain. Not towards another timetable for a border poll. And certainly not towards another Sinn Féin initiative designed to demonstrate that Irish unity is just around the corner.
It takes me back to the question of cost.
Who has paid until now and who has benefited?
What are those who have benefited most prepared to surrender if achieving their stated objective requires it?
Republicans may have to surrender some old assumptions about ownership of Irishness. We may have to make guarantees which genuinely cost us something.
And Sinn Féin may ultimately have to surrender something it has spent forty years acquiring: ownership and leadership of the unity project.
If the mass movement envisaged all those years ago is ever to exist, it cannot belong to Sinn Féin. It should not even be a republican movement. Sinn Féin can participate in it. It can argue within it. It can contribute enormously to building it. But it cannot own it.
Sometimes leadership is about knowing when it is time to stop leading.
⏩Muiris Ó Súilleabháin was a member of the Republican Movement until he retired in 2006 after 20 years of service. Fiche bhliain ag fás.
In 2008 Anthony worte a pice called piece calle Republicanism ... Alive or Dying?
ReplyDeleteMy understanding is Anthony was basically saying that republicanism needed to update its political thinking. Muiris is now saying that the unity project needs to update its political strategy.
In Anthonys piece as I understand is that republicanism had become trapped in old ideas — nationalism, physical force, anti-Britishness and party politics — without properly asking what republicanism should mean in the modern world.
Muiris is asking a similar question nearly twenty years later: what happens when those questions aren't answered?
The border poll has become the focus, Sinn Féin the main vehicle, and electoral growth the measure of progress. But the bigger question gets lost: what kind of Ireland are we actually trying to build, and how do we get people who don't already agree with us to want to be part of it?
Anthony was asking, "What should modern republicanism look like?"
Muiris is asking, "What would a modern movement for a new Ireland actually look like?"
Different articles, different times, but I think they're wrestling with essentially the same problem. And perhaps that brings us to the principle often associated with Voltaire: if we want a genuinely open political culture, we have to defend people's right to say things that offend us, not just the things we happen to agree with. The right to be offended is part of the price of the right to speak freely.
Fear Maith, Frankie
DeleteIn recent weeks, and largely as a result of this ongoing discussion, I had wondered where I had expressed these ideas but for the world of me could not remember.
Glad you found them.
Muiris,
ReplyDeleteI think yourself and Louth For Ever are driving a discussion that really should be taking place elsewhere. A niche, marginal blog does not have the reach required for proper dissemination.
It would be interesting to see Declan respond to the issues raised. I doubt he would on TPQ but were he to choose to do so he would not be cancelled.
This piece drills down a bit deeper than your previous ones probably because of the need to properly engage with Louth For Ever who writes conceptually and at analytically. So, more than one read will be required to extract everything from it.
Great piece to have.
Thanks Mackers, much appreciated. I think you're right, my desire to engage properly with Louth For Ever probably dragged me a little further into the conceptual weeds than I would normally go. I would genuinely like to see Declan engage with the discussion because, whatever our differences, there is a worthwhile conversation developing here among many TPQ contributors. Some of the best conversations have always started at the margins.
ReplyDeleteI think it unlikely that he will, but hopefully some inquisitive journalist might eventually start asking Sinn Féin some challenging questions about the current border poll fever.