Seumas Milne: Irish Unity is Inevitable
[Seumas Milne is a Guardian columnist and associate editor.]
It's not hard to see why Sinn Féin wants to turn up the volume on Irish unity – or why the party threw its weight behind a packed London conference at the weekend aimed at driving the issue up the political agenda.
This month's police and justice devolution deal set the seal on a 15-year process that has brought the republican leadership into the heart of the power structure in Northern Ireland. It's already delivered far-reaching reforms of that structure, the withdrawal of troops and once unthinkable advances in civil rights and equality.
But to many of Sinn Féin's natural supporters, the central goal of Irish republicanism – the end of British rule in the north and the reunification of Ireland – looks as far away as ever. That fuels the armed dissident republican campaign, however politically marginal it looks likely to remain.
And as the Sinn Féin leader, Pat Doherty, put it to the London conference (Gerry Adams pulled out for family reasons and Martin McGuinness was grounded by Aer Lingus engineering problems), the Good Friday agreement was an "accommodation, not a settlement" and "the underlying cause of conflict persists".
Meanwhile, the collapse of the south's once-lauded Celtic tiger economy and the savage cuts imposed by the Dublin government have been seized on by unionists and others to deride the prospect of any move towards Irish unity.
Why, they ask, would northerners now want to link up with the basket case in the south, or the south take on responsibility for Britain's taxpayer subsidies to the de-industrialised north? The idea is a nonsense, Andy Pollak, director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies, told the Sinn Féin-sponsored event on Saturday...
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
It's not hard to see why Sinn Féin wants to turn up the volume on Irish unity – or why the party threw its weight behind a packed London conference at the weekend aimed at driving the issue up the political agenda.
This month's police and justice devolution deal set the seal on a 15-year process that has brought the republican leadership into the heart of the power structure in Northern Ireland. It's already delivered far-reaching reforms of that structure, the withdrawal of troops and once unthinkable advances in civil rights and equality.
But to many of Sinn Féin's natural supporters, the central goal of Irish republicanism – the end of British rule in the north and the reunification of Ireland – looks as far away as ever. That fuels the armed dissident republican campaign, however politically marginal it looks likely to remain.
And as the Sinn Féin leader, Pat Doherty, put it to the London conference (Gerry Adams pulled out for family reasons and Martin McGuinness was grounded by Aer Lingus engineering problems), the Good Friday agreement was an "accommodation, not a settlement" and "the underlying cause of conflict persists".
Meanwhile, the collapse of the south's once-lauded Celtic tiger economy and the savage cuts imposed by the Dublin government have been seized on by unionists and others to deride the prospect of any move towards Irish unity.
Why, they ask, would northerners now want to link up with the basket case in the south, or the south take on responsibility for Britain's taxpayer subsidies to the de-industrialised north? The idea is a nonsense, Andy Pollak, director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies, told the Sinn Féin-sponsored event on Saturday...