Excellent point; I wonder why people are so prone to thinking in this way. It's a very similar thing in Israel; at the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 a sizeable amount of Palestine that was subsequently allocated to the Jewish state was owned by Jews, who had been buying it from absent Arab landlords since the 19th century. But the Palestinian propagandists persist in speaking of land "stolen" from the Arabs.

Thanks for posting about the points I made. I found this post really useful, it made me reconsider, as well as throwing a bit of light on how the whole thing started (which I was not really aware of).

You could easily have mentioned the Falklands in that last paragraph. Not to mention Hong Kong, though of course we did give that back eventually.

Absolutely, yes. A lot of people thought that the Falklands should be handed over from a democracy in which their inhabitants wanted to live to a dictatorship in which they didn't simply because of the difference in geographical distance between the islands and the two governments. I think that, whichever side you take, you should have at least a billion better reasons than that.

Good post.

In the case of Ireland, let's face it: it's not that big a deal. I'm pro-Union, but, if the island were unified, at least I'd still be in a democracy.

This is a point which has occured to me too. I mean surely living in a peaceful democracy is an infinitely more important than the question of which bunch of inept shitwipes administer it...

Unfortunately significant numbers of people on both sides don't seem to see it that way, are taken in by all the flag-waving bollocks, and then do their best to make the whole place horrendous for everybody.

True, but there is another issue. A lot of people here aren't particulary Unionist or are even Republican in principle but have a big problem with giving the IRA what they want. They believe, rightly, that rewarding killers encourages more killing — plus, of course, it's a way of pissing on the victims' graves.

Churchill wrote that his preferred course of action had been to utterly crush the rebellion and then give Ireland independence, but that his colleagues in the Cabinet didn't get what he was on about. I think he was on to something.

Well said, but this "look at the map" argument would mean that Ireland, as biggest of the Hebrides, would be given back to Britain - no thanks - while the Channel Islands would have to be given to France.
As for the Falklands, it might be irrelevant but I did enjoy the argument that a first generation Argentinian, General Galtieri, invaded people some of whom were 6th and even 7th generation Falklanders.

I found the "They were there first" argument amusing, too. First? Really? What language do they speak in Argentina again? Aztec, isn't it?

In the case of the Falklands the "who was there first" argument is still open. Umpteen generations of British settlement render it utterly redundant.

The "look at the map" argument has to be the most useless ever deployed in human history. Surely people are more important than land? The odd thing about it in the context of Ireland is that so many British lefties are convinced that the control of a particular piece of territory outweighs any consideration of the people who live there.

Austria & Germany. A very large %age of the Austrian population voted Nazi in their last election - the Nazis won. (a greater %age than in Germany I believe - anyone know?) their central policy was union with Germany, not quite the aggressive act its portrayed as nowadays where Austrians and others maintain the fiction that Austria was somehow a victim of Nazisim (in which case wasnt Germany too?). Hitler was from where again? Furthermore the Austrian parliament voted to join Germany at the end of WW1, overruled by France mainly I believe.

Two points here:

1. Ya know, I accept many of the points you've made about concessions to sf, etc., as being valid. I'm a democratic person, and I understand that.

However, I do find it quite irritating that so many people identify the relationship between Ireland and Northern Ireland as being equivalent to France and Germany, or Israel and Palestine, or blah blah.

So, let me throw this point of view out to you, and see how you react to it.

Unionist Irishmen are Irishmen, "but a different kind of Irishman" as Ervine put it. You may be British, Chinese, Icelandic, or a Falklander, but as long as you are born on the island of Ireland, you are Irish, even if you consider your nationality to be British.

The name of the state is "Great Britain and Northern Ireland", so, perhaps nationality should be described and "Great British and Northern Irish", but since "great" and "northern" are just geographical terms... then... you're just left with picking which of the two islands you come from.

Also, in terms of British-Irishness, the harp is on the queen's standard, the shamrock, St Paddy, Irish Guard, and alla of that is enmeshed into your culture if you are "Irish of British persuasion".

So, you'd probably have to extract your Irish identity from your British identity first, and change the name of the territory before you can make comparisons with Argentina, France, Sudetenland, etc.

2. And another thing, is the use of the word 'Ulster'. The truth is that of the 9 counties in Ulster, 7 are majority Irish in tradition.

Without the city of Belfast, Northern Ireland would have a massive irish-nationalist majority.

As it stands, the province of Ulster has a large irish-nationalist majority.

Yet, in so many pro-union posts, there seems to be a reluctance to even acknowledge the existence of another tradition.

3. In the republic, the catholics and protestants are united politically, and we don't distinguish between each other, and differences are invisible with the exception of border areas when there are unionists. Orange order parades take place in these areas every year, and are never blocked, and there are never riots.

These are the words that terrify unionists, because they threaten the notion that we are all different and foreign from each other. There are hundreds of thousands of protestants in southern Ireland, but politically they are mostly nationalist.

Ours are Anglo. Yours are Scots and Anglo.

Southerners generally are really bad at turning up for church/mass, unlike the north.

4.
In the south, we no longer define ourselves in terms of our difference from the British. The riots in Dublin have exposed a great divide between northern and southern nationalists.

Nobody was bothered that the LOL were marching in Dublin, in fact some were complimented by the fact that they recognised our existence in the spirit of reconciliation and peace, in order to demonstrate peacefully.

We were caught unawares, when busloads of your Northern republicans started arriving for the party, and hijacked our streets.

Truth is, most of us have British cousins and British friends over, mostly from England. Walking around, grabbing a sushi, going to Starbucks.

English people are part of our every day existence over here, as well as Ryanair, Lattes, World Cuisine, Broadband, Recycling, 3G phones, and everything else that has happened to us in the last 20 years.

In short, we've moved on. We accept your traditions, and your culture, your politics, in the spirit of peace. Nobody considers the British to be foreign, just as the British don't consider us to be foreign.

However, I wanted to make these points in order to challenge some of the beliefs you take as standard. To throw a spotlight on things..

We are not foreign to you.

> I wanted to make these points in order to challenge some of the beliefs you take as standard.

They're hardly very challenging points. With the exception of your ludicrous claim that "there are never riots" (just before you discuss the riots), it's a lot of very obvious basic stuff that most people up here take for granted. One of the biggest problems we face is that most people outside the North, including Southerners, think that everyone here is so backward that such basic thinking should be some sort of revelation to us. It isn't.


> Without the city of Belfast, Northern Ireland would have a massive irish-nationalist majority.

And without the city of London, the UK would have a much smaller black population. And?


> In the republic, the catholics and protestants are united politically, and we don't distinguish between each other, and differences are invisible with the exception of border areas when there are unionists. Orange order parades take place in these areas every year, and are never blocked, and there are never riots.

> These are the words that terrify unionists, because they threaten the notion that we are all different and foreign from each other.

They don't terrify me, and I'm a Unionist. I've never met anyone who finds such words even slightly scary. Most Unionists have been asking for what you describe for years. The Unionists who find the idea of Catholics and Protestants getting on and living with each other alarming are the imaginary Unionists who think all Catholics should be forced to live barefoot in ghettos in case they start forcing us to kowtow to the Pope and have giant families or something. You do know those Unionists don't actually exist, right?

And I have to take issue with this:

> busloads of your Northern republicans

You're trying to imply that the IRA aren't a Southern problem. Bollocks. They have major strongholds across the South, as well you know. If they're so unpopular Down South, how comes they don't get shopped to the Gardai wherever they go? After the Northern Bank Robbery, the PSNI and the Gardai searched both sides of the border, and no-one thought that was odd — especially when the money turned up in Cork. The South has its share of uncivilised sadistic bastards nursing centuries-old grievances, just as the North does. Most countries do.