A Tangled Web

Super Mac!



When a newspaper generally follows the government line as slavishly as the Belfast Telegraph does, the articles of Lindy McDowell always provide a useful antidote to propagandistic intoxication. In today's piece, McDowell draws some useful analogies between Gibraltar and Ulster. The Rock has been festooned with Union Flags to commemorate the 300th Anniversary of British rule. Likewise, the streets of Northern Ireland will also be saturated with red, white and blue as the Province's majority community makes its feelings known about Ulster's place in the Union.



In Gibraltar 99% of the population wishes to remain British. In Northern Ireland it is, unfortunately, less (somewhere in the region of 60% when the average result of innumerable surveys is calculated). Nevertheless, fundamental similarities remain between in two in the juxtaposition of popular will versus irredentist greed. On the Rock, irredentism exists thanks to the anachronistic claims of the Spanish government; in Ulster, it comes courtesy of a selfish, self-indulgent Irish minority who believes that the British State must be overthrown (by whatever means) whilst, simultaneously, demanding undeserved 'rights' from that same state.



Sanctimonious Lefties, who would pour scorn on the justified nationalistic sentiment of the Gibraltarians and Ulster British respectively, argue that the population in Great Britain does not have to resort to such overt displays of patriotism to make the same point. This argument, of course, omits to mention the psychology of constitutional certainty enjoyed on the British mainland. Ergo, if a people's national territory is threatened in any way, the trappings of national identity become much more important and much more obvious. It is no good for the Irish and the Spanish to ridicule the so-called 'siege' mentality prevalent in the aforementioned polities: they are responsible for creating that siege in the first place!