As a Mexican I agree with this sentiment.Originally Posted by backstothewall
DID YOU NOTICE A SIGN OUTSIDE MY HOUSE...?
In light of the Stormont results, can a referendum now be expected within 10-15 years? The discussion may just be beginning in the Republic, but the economic, social and political implications will need rigorous analysis before a nationalist majority occurs.
I honestly think too much stall is put in the economics of this. It's a pure emotive issue that even if it cost a 100bn a year would have Free Staters clambering to vote for it. What party would campaign against it in any circumstance? (outside the unionists)
The "Nationalist" majority will occur before the analysis.
A referendum will be held much sooner given the upheaval across the water. The ship is sinking. Who wants to go down with it?
A referendum can only be called if the secretary of State feels there is a chance of it succeeding. And if defeated another one can't be held for 7 years. No one wants it until it can succeed, And we're not there yet.
Last edited by BonnieShels; 06/03/2017 at 12:12 PM.
DID YOU NOTICE A SIGN OUTSIDE MY HOUSE...?
One of the oddest sections of column-space I've encountered in a while; Melanie Philips believes we're not even a real nation: http://www.independent.ie/irish-news...-35508997.html
If she believes northern unionists aren't British and believes there to be no such thing as a real or authentic Irish nation, what nationality does she actually believe unionists to be?
Here's the full article - http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/co...vnf0c8nhx?t=ie
Britain is the authentic nation in this battle
Melanie Phillips
Nationalist claims of Scots and Northern Irish don’t outweigh the ancient unity of the British Isles
The most troublesome bits of the United Kingdom are once again showing signs of disuniting. In Scotland, the SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon is demanding a second independence referendum on the grounds that, contrary to the English, the Scots voted to remain in the EU by 62 per cent to 38 per cent. In Northern Ireland, a surge by Sinn Fein to within one seat of the Democratic Unionists after a divisive assembly election has revived the spectre of a united Ireland, now given further rhetorical push by the jubilant nationalists on the grounds that the province also voted to remain.
It is a curiosity that the SNP and Sinn Fein want to leave the UK in order to remain in Europe. In other words, they want to reclaim powers from Westminster in order to surrender them to Brussels.
Of course they don’t see it like that. The EU, which concentrates power in Brussels while reducing nations to the status of provinces, is conversely regarded by weak nations and provinces as a way of boosting their status and income.
Scottish nationalism and Irish republicanism are cultural phenomena rooted in romanticism and myth and hatred of the other in the form of the English or the Protestants.
Nevertheless, the genie of national identity is now out of the bottle. Trans-nationalism, or the drive to erode the autonomy of nations, has been stopped in its tracks by British voters. This raises some complicated questions.
Brexit expresses the desire for independent self-government by a sovereign state based on the history, institutions and cultural ties that constitute a nation. Great Britain, though, is a confederation of three ancient nations: England, Wales and Scotland. The UK is a super-confederation of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
If national aspirations are now validated for the UK, what about the national aspirations of its constituent parts? Do all national identities have equal status? What happens when one is in direct competition with another? Scotland says it is a nation. Republicans in Northern Ireland say Britain dismembered their nation which they want to unify again. Are these claims to national identity valid? If so, where does that leave the UK?
The historians Linda Colley and Benedict Anderson famously declared the nation to be no more than an artificial construct or “imagined community.” In this post-modern formulation, the nation could therefore arbitrarily be either declared or dissolved. The nation is not, however, artificial or imagined. It is solidly rooted in a group of people united by different things at different times: geography, language, law, religion, ethnicity, history, institutions, culture.
The UK is an extraordinarily complex web of identities: civic, ethnic, cultural, national. As the historian Jonathan Clark wrote in his book Our Shadowed Present: “Britain was not invented; it developed.”
The pattern of this development has been “the resilience of a diverse and plural system of identities”. Englishness, however, came to stand proxy for all the communities of the British Isles. Even Edmund Burke, although a loyal Irishman, wrote of himself as an Englishman rather than describing himself as British.
The Scots developed over time the characteristics of a nation: a distinct language, religion, legal system and so on. The UK was formed in 1707 by the union of two distinct kingdoms, England and Scotland.
Kingship matters because monarchs unify tribes into a nation. Wales was subsumed into the English legal system by Henry VIII and so lost its separate identity except for residual ties to the Welsh language.
Northern Ireland is different again. The Unionists hate this being said but they are not British. They’re the bit that got tacked on to Great Britain to make the UK.
Does that mean Westminster should tear up the Good Friday agreement and bid farewell to Northern Ireland? No, because it has an obligation to the Unionists; and because the claim to unite Ireland is tenuous since Ireland itself has a tenuous claim to nationhood, having seceded from Britain as the Irish Free State only in 1922.
Britain, by contrast, is an authentic unitary nation. It didn’t begin with the union with Scotland but as the British Isles, an island nation defending itself (or not) against invaders from across the seas. Throughout its history, it was beset by attempts at secession by tribes across Hadrian’s Wall and across the Irish Sea.
The prime minister’s speech to the Scottish Conservatives last week was said to have attacked the SNP for wanting to do to Britain precisely what Mrs May was doing to Europe: seceding on the grounds of independence. The comparison, however, is spurious.
Britain is a nation with the right to rule itself. It is the EU which is the artificial construct, the imagined community that falsely claims for itself the hollow appurtenances of a nation. The EU therefore has no prior claim on its constituent nations which are under no obligation to remain. By contrast, the United Kingdom is a nation which is governed in accordance with its name. Scotland has no right to rip it asunder if it wants to secede from the Union (which in any event is highly doubtful).
Faced with the contemporary resurgence of regional or tribal uprisings, it’s the ancient British Isles that must hold itself together to take its place once again as a sovereign nation in the wider world.
Melanie Phillips is a right wing nutjob.
"The EU, which concentrates power in Brussels while reducing nations to the status of provinces". Yet at the same time the UK Government White Paper on Brexit admits that UK parliament is sovereign and always has been, it just didn't always "feel that way".
"Scottish nationalism and Irish republicanism are cultural phenomena rooted in romanticism and myth and hatred of the other in the form of the English or the Protestants."
Nothing to do with Catholics getting burnt out of their houses, denied access to jobs, housing and education and getting shot at during demonstrations.
She's also pretty much a professional troll these days and a great example of how the internet and the ability to link and share content has changed how media organisations try and attract consumers/clickers.
Last edited by osarusan; 07/03/2017 at 1:14 PM.
She's the next RDE, in waiting and a Zionist nut. Ironic as remember her as a Guardian columnist!
So is Britain a unitary state or a confederation?
I already castigated a friend from sharing this on fb. And how in a nation so long dealing with RDE and K Myers that we should know better. A horror show of an article. There's nothing wrong with trolling if done intelligently and with knowledge. She has neither.
That been siad, when will Unionists/Brits/Home Countiers ever learn that the cause of the union isn't helped by belittling those who they feel should bow down and accept their serfdom.
DID YOU NOTICE A SIGN OUTSIDE MY HOUSE...?
Thanks for that.
She appears to confuse statehood and nationhood/nationality.
On the non-applicability of use of the loaded, incendiary, "anachronistic and frankly revanchist" term "British Isles" when referring to Ireland - which the Irish government advises against and which the British government correspondingly avoids - I wrote the following a while back:
Ireland is not a British isle politically, nor is it part of Britain (also referred to as Great Britain, of course) geographically. Neither is it a possession of Britain. Incidentally, the use of the prefix “Great” before “Britain” distinguishes Great Britain, otherwise known in Latin as Britannia major, not from Ireland – as is sometimes incorrectly assumed – but from Britannia minor, which translates as “Lesser Britain” and approximates to the modern-day Celtic region of Brittany in north-west France.
Furthermore, Ireland’s predominant lingua-cultural history is Goidelic, or Gaelic; Ireland has never been culturally Brittonic, from where the name of Britain is derived on account of Common Brittonic (which later evolved into the various Brittonic languages) having been widely spoken there by the people who inhabited it, the Britons. The Goidelic and Brittonic lingual branches are indeed both Celtic in origin, but they are understood to have evolved separately and simultaneously on either side of the Irish Sea, in Ireland and Britain respectively, from a common Insular Celtic predecessor.
The contemporary incarnation of the term “British”, latterly misappropriated by the non-Brittonic English crown, only ever came to be applied (inappropriately) over Ireland in the late sixteenth century by the crown (and by force) in tandem with, or in attempted justification of, the latter’s politico-military conquests and activities; exploits that impacted severely upon the Irish people, landowners and native aristocracy. The term’s connotations are thus unavoidably political. Indeed, Welsh nationalist Gwynfor Evans once described Britishness as “a political synonym for Englishness which extends English culture over the Scots, the Welsh, and the Irish”.
I see no-one picked up on the result of that poll above...
Ah, I'm not sure how much significance you can take from the results of polls where the samples are self-selecting as opposed to those that are conducted with random samples or using a cross-section that is as proportionate as possible to existing and relevant societal demographics.
Belfast's Siobhan Fenton, writing in the UK's Independent, believes unity is now an inevitably: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/...-a7615756.html
I've met Melanie Phillips a few times through work. Quite mild-mannered, unlike her Question Time/ Moral Maze persona. As Osarusan says, she's largely a media troll nowadays.
I see Siobhan Fenton doesn't offer much actual evidence for the inevitable UI. She could have usefully quoted the poll below or at least looked forward to a similar exercise post-Brexit.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-34725746
PS I've noticed the term British Isles being used more often in recent years, including by people hardly sympathetic to Ulster Unionism or right-wing Conservative politics.
Last edited by Gather round; 08/03/2017 at 11:08 AM.
There is no evidence for an inevitable UI.
Fenton's piece is an opinion piece. She "feels" that it is more likely now than ever before.
Re that November 2015 opinion poll, it leads with a strange question and I dismissed it out of hand as a result.
The only question worth asking is "Do you want a United Ireland?", not something with qualifiers appended to it to make its uit some sort of narrative like "Ireland Thinks" from a few days ago.
Would you not take on board the spurious journal.ie poll from a few days ago?
A clear majority want reunification. Every party in the South has some positive policy on it. Stop living in cloud cuckoo land telling us that in fact we don't want it!
AS an aside:
Even the GFA mentions this majority within Article 1:
Last edited by BonnieShels; 08/03/2017 at 11:35 AM.
DID YOU NOTICE A SIGN OUTSIDE MY HOUSE...?
A poll from two years ago, pre-Brexit? About as much use as a chocolate teapot. Or perhaps big Arlene...
On the basis of advice to his constituents over the last six months, presumably I.Paisley Junior would disagree!
As for the 'British Isles', a generic term made up by the Brits for use in the English language, so what?
Bonita- all I'm telling you is what every Government in the South (backed by public opinion) has done for 90 years. If you prefer to read too much into a few simplistic polls while dismissing the more detailed ones, go ahead.
Wolfie- had you read/ understood to the end of my last post, you'd have seen me suggest an update to the November 2015 poll.
Do better.
Brexit is a game-changer. Surveys conducted in November of 2015 - prior to the Brexit referendum - aren't worth a huge deal in the present context (if they could be entirely relied upon anyway) insofar as they don't take account of what is, or will be, a massive material change for people economically, politically, socially and psychologically.
I envisage Tory policies and cuts, which (will) lead directly to further neglect of and hardship for people in the north of Ireland, also influencing a change in mindset amongst the northern population in favour of a preferable alternative - Irish unity perhaps - and I think you have acknowledged this yourself. The Tories are in the process of dismantling the NHS, for example; that's usually the main card that those content with remaining in union with Britain cling on to. Tory policies and cuts are bound to increasingly alienate even unionists.
Support for unity is on the rise in the north, as reported in this Irish Times piece from last September, and that's even before Article 50 has been triggered or Brexit has been put into effect: http://www.irishtimes.com/news/irela...eals-1.2784882
Sinn Féin's recent electoral surge (combined with the fact that the SDLP maintained their ground) must surely also be indicative of the reality that a growing number of nationalists are less content with present arrangements.
Anecdotally, Brexit has also angered and alienated many of my (northern nationalist) friends who might have been previously-indifferent to the unity question. Since the referendum, they've been more open to the idea of Irish unity with some saying they would now prefer it to the 'status quo'. I think this change is reflective of a broader turning tide. Unity is at least been taken seriously as an option now; previously, many content nationalists just saw it as a romantic pipe-dream rather than as a serious proposition.
I thought its general use was waning, but perhaps I'm mistaken. Any specific examples of people who aren't sympathetic to unionism or Conservatism using it? Who are you referring to exactly?PS I've noticed the term British Isles being used more often in recent years, including by people hardly sympathetic to Ulster Unionism or right-wing Conservative politics.
I'm ignoring all polls though, because they fail to ever ask a simple question and invariably contains some sort of extraneous qualifier that suits the person who commissioned the poll. Until a poll is commissioned asking "Do you want a united Ireland?" and nothing else and is of a standard that can be trusted then there is little point in discussing them.
DID YOU NOTICE A SIGN OUTSIDE MY HOUSE...?
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