I'm starting to concur with you UI. At one point, it looked like peace in Northern Ireland was going to be the crowning glory of Blair's Government.
These days I wonder if all this rolling over for Sinn Fein is a slipstream toward getting shot of the arseholes who claim to 'lead' NI. If there's only one government involved - the Irish one - then it removes a powerful amount of the bickering that has stagnated NI for years.
Did I just say that? Yikes!
I'm certainly in favor of a united Ireland, but that's not what I write about here.
I know and do business with a number of people in England, and when they speak of the North of Ireland, which isn't often, even in a no-holds barred political conversation, almost all of these business people would very much like to see NI go away.
They view NI as a kind of kooky place where there is/was/will be terrorism, and where communal progress will never be made, and where everyone fights over things like marches and battles fought centuries ago, the kind of thing that never happens in other places.
I think that the Brits I know--they are more than a few-- do not even regard six county Ulster as being part of Britain at all.
I think if the most passionate " British " Ulster partisans had an idea on how they were thought of in Great Britain, they would be astonished.
I think you may be onto something here.
My take, for what it's worth, is that the reason England invaded Ireland was to prevent the creation of an Norman-Irish state that could be used as an ally by the French. In short - to neutralise a military threat.
Since 1989, for the first time in 1,000 years, there is no threat, real or perceived, of an invasion of Britain from the Continent. Therefore, the fear of Ireland being used as an ally by the enemy has gone.(The enemy was France, Spain, Germany, Russia - it changed over time but the fear was the same.)
It is no coincidence that the UK government started talking to Sinn Fein in the early 1990s. Ireland no longer has any strategic military importance for Britain, so the British governent no longer needs a presence there. They are now quite happy to let NI join the Republic.
Commenting by HaloScan
