Yeah,
its all fine and dandy to carp, but what's your
alternative strategy?
Kevin
Myers (boo, hiss) wrote a good piece in the Irish
Times bout a year back in which he referred
to the "sheer cosmic pointlessness"
of the 30 years of murder and counter murder.
And he was right. Sunningdale for very slow learners.
I
quote from your piece:
"To
bring the North to this point was not worth
one drop of blood, republican or any other.
The SDLP gained more in 1974 and its leadership,
like Napier, killed nobody."
True.
Totally true. Tragically true. However: the main
point here is, not to go over old ground, but
ask yourself: where do we go from here?
Can't
remember which academic said this: any army in
any war: one of them gets defeated, the other
wins. (Or in some cases, there is an armistice,
like now.) Justice has little to do with it.
Someone
in the defeated army says: what did we fight for?
Why did all these people die? We, the ones who
did not die, must continue the struggle in order
to ensure that the dead did not die in vain. It's
a fallacy: continuing the struggle just means
more people dying in vain. Just suck it up and
accept that they died in vain.
Look:
the Irish Republic is the Land of Milk & Honey:
4% unemployment, 7% year on year economic growth
for the last dozen years, U.S. software companies
opening on every street corner, the farmers with
Euro subsidies coming out their arses, a property
boom which has turned the good people of Dublin
into millionaires: this, combined with the catastrophic
decline in the Ulster Protestant engineering heartland,
means that a lot of Ulstermen will have to swallow
their pride and send their sons down south to
get a job; also, as and when the U.K. joins the
Eurozone, the island of Ireland will have one
currency; the economic arguments for some sort
of compromise federal solution will become unanswerable.
The Northern middle class, Catholic and Protestant,
already understand this.
