A Tangled Web

There May Be Trouble Ahead



According the to Provisional IRA's favourite Sunday read, Fianna Fail (Sinn Fein/IRA without the weapons) is set to allow membership for people resident in Northern Ireland. It could set the scene for the foray of Southern nationalism into British politics - either through a Faustian pact with the SDLP, or as a supplanting party structure.



If precedent is anything to go by, I shouldn't be all that concerned. Look at how the secondment regulations for Southern participation in the PSNI were hailed as an advancement towards the jaundiced Utopia of all-Ireland interlocking institutional structures. To-date, 24 citizens from the Republic serve in a force of 7,000 strong. Hardly ground-breaking is it?



Northern nationalists have decided to choose murderers and fascists for their political representatives. I honestly cannot see how the encroachment of Bertie's disciples will seriously affect the situation. A party operating within the boundaries of the United Kingdom will gradually becomes accustomed to British-oriented politics unless, of course, Fianna Fail chooses to leech the Queen's shilling whilst boycotting Westminster. In that case, the Mother of Parliaments would be spared the putrescence of both strands of Irish nationalism. Ah bliss!!!



However, there was one sentence in the article which triggered severe annoyance on my part. It was a suggestion from some Fianna Fail nobody about the temporary existence of Northern Ireland!! '"If Northern Ireland is a transitional arrangement, then the SDLP must be a transitional party," said one party member this weekend." ' What is it with idiots like this? Did the Irish so enjoy their last civil war that they wish to engender the conditions for a fresh one!? If 'The Republican Party' is going to stick its hooter in Ulster's politics with views like the above, it's preparing its membership for possibly more trouble than they can handle.