A Tangled Web

Tom's Tosh



Check out this rubbish from Tom Griffin in the Irish World (the newspaper for those Irish happily residing in Britain who, simultaneously, campaign for British citizens in Northern Ireland to be stripped of their constitutional and nationalistic rights). It never ceases to amaze me just how much utter stupidity comes from the mouths and the pens of primary advocates of an all-Ireland state. In Griffin's case, it is his argument that a cumulative chain of causation stemming from a resurrected Stormont would sweep all before it, minimising 'dependency' on the British State and, thus, providing the ideal circumstances for a 'united Ireland' to emerge.



What a load of bollocks! Has it occurred to the likes of Griffin that any 'dependency' Ulster had on the rest of the United Kingdom was because of the terrorist warfare being raged by the same people he now believes are sufficiently rehabilitated to categorise them as units of democracy and democratic rule? Nationalists never talk of the dependency the Irish Republic has had on the European Union for much of its membership. People advocating the territorial expansion of a polity which still receives the equivalent of £6 for every £1 it contributes to Brussels' coffers can scarcely lecture on the pitfalls of dependency to anybody else.



Now we move on to the whole question of devolution as a vehicle to drive Ulster from the Union. If Griffin is so confident of such a sequence, perhaps he should inform we ardent supporters of the Union why we should therefore support something which would be to our fundamental long-term detriment? The dichotomy is not between 'Irish democracy' or 'British dependency', but between a stable and prosperous region of the UK - governed in the interests of its broadest number of citizens, or as a tool of a peace process designed to embolden and strengthen terrorist apologists. Griffin's bastardised formula for the objective of a bastardised constitutional entity is not one we Unionists are likely to endorse.