Posted by Jim on June 8, 2017
The Pensive Quill
Writing in Brocaire Books author Matt Treacy looks ahead at some features of todays UK election in the North.
Sinn Féin are fighting the British general election on the basis of absolute opposition to the Democratic Unionist Party, and their corrupt ways. You would imagine that it might have been two other parties who had been in coalition in the Stormont Executive since 2007. And that it will be two other parties entirely who will re-enter such an arrangement once the dust of the elections dies down.
Some facts:
Not only were Sinn Féin in coalition with the DUP for the guts of a decade, but for most of that time they effectively operated as an adjunct of the Tory government in London. Which included implementing the dreaded “austerity” measures that are so disliked in Dublin. Until the Shinners get to implement them most likely.
It is ironic indeed that having made ten years of “difficult decisions,” including cuts to public service pay, schools, hospitals, not to mention advocating lowering corporation tax, that Sinn Féin’s bottom line issues now are to do with the Irish language and “legacy issues.” All of which were fudged in the Stormont House Agreement.
There is also the canard that they will be able to institute a Border poll and that they will win it. Neither is likely. A border poll is not in the gift of Stormont even if Sinn Féin were to become the biggest party. Election results for the past 20 years also indicate little or no change in the balance between pro Union parties and those putatively in favour of a united Ireland. There is not a mission that an internal border poll would be in favour of unity.
So, all the talk of being on the verge of a united Ireland is just a smokescreen. Republican voters to be sure were getting frustrated and annoyed with the meaninglessness of Sinn Féin being in “power.” That forced them to pull out, against the wishes of the apparat, in January.
In February 2004, An Phoblacht published a long article by Laura Friel bemoaning the fact that West Belfast, on a whole range of indicators, was the “most deprived constituency” in the United Kingdom. Of course that was all the fault of the Brits and so on.
In 2013, a survey found that West Belfast was the second worst constituency regarding a whole range of deprivation indices across 650 Westminster constituencies . A 2015 Northern Assembly report showed that West Belfast was by far the most deprived part of the six counties.
Now, while in 2004 it might have been vaguely plausible to blame all of this on the Brits, we are talking about a place where you couldn’t fart for the last 40 years without republican approval. Where the only jobs are either in the “community sector” or with various gombeen low wage employers who are invariably “well connected.”
If any constituency in the 26 counties had such an appalling demographic and the place had been controlled by the same party for 40 years, including having ministers, the shinners would be up in arms about it. No wonder the Trotskyist People Before Profit won and retained an Assembly seat there, despite considerable “community pressure,” ahem. Many people are sick of the pretence and the Orwellian lies.
Once the dust settles, Sinn Féin will face the option of either re-entering coalition with the dreaded DUP, or refusing to. In either case, they will be accepting the internal partitionist parameters of the Good Friday Agreement, which make it quite clear what the procedures for any move towards a united Ireland are. These people negotiated it. They know very well what it means, despite all the electoral hysteria.
At the moment they are on a bit of a high and there are no shortage of eijits who believe the hype. The real fun will begin once the votes are counted in any possible Stormont election, or if there is an agreement on the basis of the last one.
Oh, more “difficult decisions,” no doubt….
Posted by Jim on June 7, 2017
Mark Hayes, author and researcher, reviews a book by long time republican activist and former IRA prisoner Matt Treacy.
Matthew Treacy, an ex-IRA volunteer and Sinn Fein activist who spent more than 30 years in the Republican movement, has chosen to publish a book about his experiences. Before I make any substantive observations about the content of his text, in the interest of honesty and transparency I should make a confession – I have been a friend of Matt Treacy for many years. Indeed, I remember visiting him in the dreary edifice of Portlaoise prison during the “troubles”. So disentangling personal and political motivations in the context of writing a review might be construed as a challenging task.
In fact this proposition is less onerous than one might assume because I have often disagreed with Matt Treacy, and I know he is sensible enough to welcome robust debate and intelligent discussion. Which brings us to the book itself.
Treacy’s text deals with the “endgame” in Ireland and the demise of militant Irish Republicanism: “the end of the Irish Republican Army”. This delicate subject is tackled through the lens of his own personal experience as someone who was at the very epicentre of the Provisional Republican machine for many years. If anyone was a Sinn Fein “insider” it was Matthew Treacy, which affords his recollections a heuristic value which perhaps evades other, similar account.
The first point to make is an obvious one. Treacy is a talented writer and has a keen eye for the subtle nuances of political subterfuge, and he covers the choreography of the “peace process” with dexterity and skill. Indeed, anyone wishing to track the electoral fortunes of Sinn Fein in recent years could do far worse than consult the psephological analysis contained in this text.
Treacy takes us through the “peace process” and examines how it played out from a Provisional perspective. However, in the process of outlining these historic political developments Treacy also outlines a critique of Sinn Fein which is both insightful, acerbic and, occasionally, humorous. The essence of Treacy’s thesis is that Sinn Fein is, fundamentally, an organisation which is “opportunist” and “tactically promiscuous”. Sinn Fein, according to Treacy, has had its ideology subverted by new post-modern political fashions and been bought off by the “benign corruption” implicit in British government funding of community projects in the north of Ireland. In effect Treacy argues that Sinn Fein has succumbed to the “liberal left” and the “soft power” of the British state.
The logic of this process, of course, has been to underpin the Union and reinforce sectarian categories in the scramble for scarce resources. Traditional Republican aspirations have thereby been seriously attenuated, or discarded altogether. In effect Sinn Fein has become an electoral machine designed to win votes at any cost, and what Treacy’s narrative describes is a sorry tale of relentless political pragmatism – a party driven by an instrumental calculus of cost-benefit analysis and cynical self-interest.
In terms of actual political dividends, Treacy suggests that the results for Sinn Fein have been meagre, to say the least. The Good Friday Agreement was concluded as an “internal settlement”, which has meant that the “Unionist veto” has remained intact. The much vaunted “cross border bodies” have clearly had no measurable impact on the contours of the Union, and are described by Treacy as “impotent” and “irrelevant”. He should know.
However, Treacy does make the rather more interesting point that the hostility and acrimony of the Unionists at key moments in the process made it much easier to sell the GFA to a republican constituency because there was an implicit assumption that if the loyalists were unhappy it must be good for republicans. It wasn’t. In fact, the GFA was little different (and may be worse) than Sunningdale or Hillsborough, a point that Treacy makes to good effect. Indeed, Matt Treacy goes on to say that the GFA represented “nothing less than almost total capitulation by revolutionary republicanism”. Of course, this is hardly surprising given the fact that, as noted in the book, British government official Jonathan Powell was writing speeches for Martin McGuinness, to be delivered at the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis. One is reminded, in reading this, of Brendan Hughes’s explanation of the acronym GFA as “Got Fuck All”.
This makes for uncomfortable reading if you are a Republican, but it is hardly news. However, in playing their particular political parlour games Treacy also reiterates that the leadership of Provisional Republicanism have been less than honest with their activists. As he points out:
…at no stage did Adams and McGuinness and their closest supporters ever let on, to the very end, to the IRA or the republican support base, that a united Ireland was not an achievable objective. Had they done so then they would not have been able to bring the IRA or Sinn Fein to the stage where they agreed to an internal settlement and de facto to Partition.
Whether this was a deliberate misrepresentation or a more piecemeal accommodation with emerging “political realities” is immaterial – the fact is that many in the Provisional movement were deceived. That Matt Treacy confirms this should at least be of some comfort to those that have claimed this all along. Many republicans were, in effect, misled into surrendering. However, according to Treacy submission was not the worst possible option, because the task which Republicanism had set itself was far too difficult to accomplish – the “war” was unwinnable.
In the book Treacy notes, in confessional tones, his own growing disenchantment with military option, despite the fact he was recruiting officer for the Dublin Brigade while working as a researcher for Sinn Fein in Leinster House. It became increasing clear to Treacy that the military strategy was no longer viable. However, he notes that during the “peace process” many in the IRA were very slow to grasp the new realities, indeed “some chaps were still avidly following the progress of an increasingly erratic ‘war’ with the blind faith of stranded Japanese soldiers on a Pacific Atoll convinced that some stroke of military genius would turn the tide in favour of the Army of the Republic”.
Interestingly, Treacy points out that to a large extent the IRA in the prisons were largely kept in the dark over key developments during the “peace process”. For example, the so-called debates around the TUAS document, which was circulated to prisoners, was designed to foster ambiguity. Treacy recollects that he was told TUAS was “Towards an Unarmed Struggle” but the various alternative explanations fitted well the “Orwellian machinations designed to convince disparate parties of whatever the Army Council thought they wanted or needed to hear”.
Treacy clearly felt that he, and other members of the IRA were “unwitting pawns in a game” where they were “unaware of the rules”. Yet some volunteers were nevertheless anxious to believe the leadership were not leading them astray: “from what I saw myself, both in prison and afterwards, most IRA members believed anything they were told, no matter how absurd”.
Treacy clearly came to a realisation that the armed struggle was a dead-end, as he puts it: I felt under no obligation to make any more stupid decisions on the basis of some illusion. It was every man for himself as far as I was concerned”.
Unsurprisingly Treacy now rejects the “deluded fantasists” and “retro Provos” who believe a new army can achieve what the PIRA could not. As Treacy confirms in a telling turn of phrase: “No doubt Adams was the consummate Machiavellian in bringing an unwinnable war to an end. If for no other reason he deserves thanks for that”.
Yet there was another dimension to the acquiescence of Sinn Fein to British rule. Sinn Fein, according to Treacy, had been subverted by an infatuation with “identity politics”. The idea of an “Ireland of equals”, “parity of esteem” or “national reconciliation” is regarded by Treacy, as vacuous nonsense, which meant Sinn Fein constructed a strategy consisting of “politically correct soundbites”.
Treacy notes that “the meaningless slogan of ‘equality’ has pretty much replaced any pretence to being socialist”. The “Shinner left” had become infected by “ultra-liberal” concerns, which focused on abortion, immigration and certain marginalised social groups. Moreover, Treacy notes that militant socialism was abruptly and unceremoniously jettisoned in order to form an alliance with constitutional nationalism in the hope of invoking the support of Irish and US governments. Diplomatic pan-Nationalism therefore displaced radical, socialist anti-imperialism as the key strategic imperative.
Treacy also points out that “the move away from anything that might be construed as Marxism caused little stir within either the IRA or Sinn Fein, where even in the rare cases that it was properly understood, had never been more than an exotic minority interest”. Sinn Fein, with its focus on “identity politics” was perfectly prepared to abandon the notion of class conflict and ride the new zeitgeist. Of course, Treacy is correct to call out the “happy clappy” lefties, many of whom had infected the “New” Labour party in Britain. Indeed, Treacy mentions Ken Livingston and Jeremy Corbyn in this context, although there are much better examples – Anthony Giddens or Geoff Mulgan for example, whose muddled musings on the “third way” and post-modern “designer socialism” nearly destroyed the Labour movement in Britain.
The bottom line for Sinn Fein, according to Treacy, was that a new breed of activists, many of whom were motivated by careerism, had replaced many of the old “revolutionaries” who were “active when it was dangerous”. Treacy is clearly angry at this transformation, and it is difficult not to concur with him that “the left” in general has indeed been infected by the most insipid type of middle class lifestyle lobbyists who have absolutely no organic link to working class people at all. They are indeed a pestilential nuisance.
However, where Matt Treacy is far less convincing is when he talks about the “shedding of ideological illusions” especially his summary dismissal of the left-wing critique of Sinn Fein. This is where, politically speaking, he and I part company. Treacy is dismissive of the Republican Congress, and he notes (perhaps correctly) that Eirigi is “moribund”, but the vitriol deployed to deride any and all efforts at egalitarian transcendence suggests a much deeper animus – and Treacy repeats this often enough in the text to suggest that he genuinely believes it. For example, Treacy talks about:
‘the urge to make men perfect against their will’. They have learned nothing from the horrors of Leninism and Stalinism and Nazism and Maoism, and all the other simplistic myths that murdered tens of millions in order to make them and the rest of us better people.
Now this is contentious stuff. It would indeed be interesting, for example, to try and tease out exactly how Nazism was designed to “make better people”. However, of greater importance for republicans is the fact that Treacy has his eyes more firmly fixed on the “delusions” of “scientific socialism”, “the failed economics of socialism” and “simplistic slogan ridden diaper Marxism favoured by left wing Republicans”. Indeed, Treacy argues that “most serious historians of political ideology would claim that there is a profound disjunction between the pursuit of a nebulous concept like ‘equality’, and democracy, other than of course equality before the law”. Enough is enough. This is just not true, in fact one of the reasons why right-wing political theorists got so agitated about the electoral process and the extension of the franchise is precisely because of the seemingly inexorable logic which drives democracy toward equality – of rights, opportunity and material outcomes.
Nevertheless, not content with traducing Marxism, Treacy quotes favourably the likes of Popper, Berlin and Hayek, and goes on to talk about “utopian totalitarian ideologies”, the “totalitarian nightmare”, “totalitarian myths of class or of race”, and “the mass murder of millions in the Soviet Union”. This is dangerous territory, and such comments are particularly disingenuous because, as Treacy surely knows, the “freedom loving” nations of the West were also constructed upon a mountain of corpses (slavery, colonialism, imperialism) and the black farce of counting victims cannot eradicate that fact.
Moreover, “totalitarianism” as a theory (as articulated by the likes of Schapiro or Brzezinski for example) was a conceptual remnant of the Cold War which was specifically designed to tar Communism with the same brush as Fascism. It is a simplistic conceptual trap which Dr. Treacy (apparently gleefully) has fallen into. The “totalitarian” theory is flawed principally because it focuses on political methods rather than desired social outcomes but, more importantly, it defames the memory of those brave communists who actually fought and died fighting fascism. To paraphrase Primo Levi, it is perfectly possible to conceive of a communism without concentration camps, but the idea of fascism without them is utterly inconceivable. In short, connecting fascism and communism is lazy politics, and “totalitarian theory” is nonsense on stilts – it is the usual neo-liberal bullshit dressed up in a tuxedo and no amount of semantic chicanery can make it otherwise. Reading Hayek et al is entirely excusable in an effort to stave off the boredom induced by enforced incarceration, but taking them seriously is quite another matter – their self-serving theoretical constructions were drivel before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the financial crash of 2008, and the idea that we should take them seriously now is risible.
Without some kind of extended analysis, Treacy’s perfunctory forays into political philosophy are not simply ill-judged, they can be easily construed as gratuitous grand-standing. Indeed, it might be argued that Treacy has thrown the baby out with the bath water because there is an obvious left-republican tradition which eschews the trendy post-modern, politically-correct notions of “equality” as deployed by Sinn Fein – and we need to look no further than James Connolly to find it (Connolly does not feature at all in the book).
Perhaps if I was forced to walk a mile in Matt Treacy’s shoes I would also be sceptical about the utility of political ideologies and their “malign consequences”. I haven’t, so I am not, but to put my point in another more personalised way, it is relatively easy to malign Martin McGuinness or indeed marginalise Micky McKevitt, but dismissing Tommy McKearney or Eddie O’Neill (men who have experienced the very worst of the “troubles” but who have retained deeply held socialist principles) is not quite so easy. Matthew Treacy knows this, and I know he knows.
Of course, Treacy is undoubtedly correct to point out that Sinn Fein “has been able to survive the regular expulsion and resignations of large numbers of experienced people including elected representatives without that cohering as a political threat”. The sooner that changes the better, but it is difficult to see how Matt Treacy can contribute to that process.
In conclusion, maybe sceptics are entitled to ask why it took Matt Treacy so long to write this book, and they might even point to the issue of remuneration and his refusal to comply with Sinn Fein’s party line on wages (which is dealt with at length), but it is very difficult to argue with his critique of Sinn Fein. Indeed, Treacy now adds his name to the ever-expanding pantheon of those who have managed to detach themselves from the eviscerated husk of Provisional Republicanism.
We might note that the title of the book “A Tunnel to the Moon” uses a phrase borrowed from Anthony McIntyre, which is entirely appropriate because McIntyre’s thesis on the trajectory of Provisional Republicanism, outlined many years ago, has proven to be remarkably prescient. I have disagreed with Matt Treacy, McIntyre, and other ex-Provisionals on many things over the years but the consensus that has been constructed around the reality of Sinn Fein’s egregious apostasy is absolutely compelling. They have abandoned militant socialist Republicanism to become a meaningless political cult that worships the electoral process and Matt Treacy’s latest treatise confirms this in a spectacular way.
Matt Treacy isn’t going to win many friends with this book, which in many ways seems deliberately designed to be provocative, but that will not bother him in the slightest. Treacy is a formidable talent and his loss to the Sinn Fein is a very serious blow – and they will doubtless try to undermine the substance of his critique by attempting to destroy his integrity. They will fail. The real tragedy, however, is that Matt Treacy, and many other so-called “dissidents”, committed themselves to a movement that was not worthy of the many magnificent volunteers that supported it.
Matt Treacy, 2017. A Tunnel to the Moon: The End of the Irish Republican Army.
Posted by Jim on
A very thoughtful but unshareable post found in another Irish group:
“A British view
I was born in England of Scottish parents. I’d like to tell you how I was brought up to view the Irish as it’s a fairly typical story.
My parents weren’t particularly prejudiced considering their era. I wasn’t directly taught that Irish (or ‘blacks’ for that matter) were inferior. There was some casual racism by my peers….. some pathetic jokes against minorities including the Irish. But nor was I aware of the tragic and at the same time magnificent story that formed Ireland’s history, or the wicked part that ‘my’* country had played in beating down that wonderful race. *My country, yes, but I had no choice where I was born – as did none of you.
As a child, I was scared of the IRA because they killed people (ordinary people, not soldiers) quite near to where we lived. As a young adult, I worked in the City of London where one was nervous in case an IRA bomb went off near one’s workplace. There were stories of someone called Bobby Sands who was exactly the same age as me. His face, in newspaper articles so full of spite and bias, looked open and noble. How could that be? I learned he had been imprisoned by my country for his evil deeds. He was on hunger strike. What was hunger strike? I tried to imagine. If I went on hunger strike for any reason I’m afraid I would give up as soon as I was really, truly hungry. If I knew I was dying, I’d most certainly crumble. I am a weakling really and I admit that. But reading about Bobby Sands who was villified all around me I thought, ‘what makes a man do that?’ I felt unable to join in the criticism of my peers. Although he was doubtless a ‘bad’ man (and of course it took me a long while to work out that in fact ‘bad’ didn’t apply) he surely must at the same time be brave, enduring such suffering for the sake of his beliefs however foolish they were?
Then I tried to understand the motives of the men who were bombing civilians in London. I felt a grudging admiration for them, together with fear and horror. Like Jeremy Corbyn, I don’t condone terrorism. But what is terrorism?
Now I’m 63. This is the age Bobby Sands would have been and deserves to be still. He deserves to be winding down with a whiskey on a summer’s evening, or playing with his grandchildren, or taking his dog for a walk in the mountains of his homeland. And I see things more clearly now. I see a history – not just of my lifetime, but the lifetimes of my parents, grandparents, gg grand parents, and centuries before that – where one of the most warm-hearted, poetic and beautiful inside and out nations had the misfortune to be geographically situated next to one of the world’s greatest bullies. They were gagged and persecuted and sneered at and tortured by their greedy, delusional and oppressive neighbours. They were tormented and murdered by a race that was too stupid to even realise their victims’ precious worth. How many a great writer, artist, philanthropist, composer, philosopher, poet, loving mother or father was smothered before they could even exist? It now, belatedly, occurs to me that long-drawn-out slow, mean cruelty is actually worse than ‘terrorism’ for a valid cause. In fact, oppression IS terrorism – it’s just more protracted and therefore even more pernicious. And it often wears the gaudy garb of hypocrisy.”
Posted by Jim on June 5, 2017
A protest was held on Friday afternoon, June 2, over the inclusion of
the names of British soldiers and RUC members killed during the conflict
in an installation at the Museum of Free Derry.
Margaret Wray, whose brother Jim Wray was one of the teenagers shot dead
on Bloody Sunday, has said she is demanding artefacts currently housed
at the museum be returned to her family, including the jacket with the
bullet holes he was wearing that day.
The furore is over a new installation which includes a video to list the
victims of the conflict between 1969-1972, including the names of the
British occupying forces.
Scores of protesters gathered at the entrance to the museum on Friday
afternoon to call for the names and details of British soldiers and RUC
personnel to be removed. A small number also gathered to support their
inclusion.
The attempt to create a single narrative of the conflict mirrors efforts
by the Dublin government to pay tribute to British soldiers who died
during Ireland’s freedom struggle alongside those Irish heroes who died
or were executed by British forces.
A petition with 1,000 names was handed into the Derry museum earlier
this week over their installation.
Speaking during the protest, Margaret Wray said: “Nobody wants peace as
much as me and wants the true history recorded, but there is a place for
everything, and policemen’s names and British soldiers’ names – that
museum is not the place for it, where my grandmother’s windows were shot
in that day in that very building, and my brother was just up there.”
She added; “I belong to no organisation or group. I want peace, I’m
delighted with peace and I respect all cultures but this is not the
place for the list of soldiers and RUC members here. Why are they doing
that in here?”
She said if the list is not removed she will have the jacket her brother
was wearing when he was killed returned to the family.
The organisers of the protest Brian Boyle, who has set up a ‘Not In Free
Derry’ Facebook page, said he had received huge support for his stance,
and said there would be more protests if the names are not removed.
“What we want is to be able to remember our dead without a reminder of
those who occupied, tortured, maimed or murdered our friends and loved
ones,” he said.
Kate Nash, whose 19-year-old brother William was among those shot dead
on Bloody Sunday, called on the museum to remove the names immediately.
“It disgusts me that they are remembering British soldiers and police
officers when my brother was murdered by British soldiers right outside
their front door. I would ask the Bloody Sunday Trust to take these
names down,” she said.
Jean Hegarty, who works for the Bloody Sunday Trust which owns the
museum, said there were British Army personnel who had died in the same
place in the same period. Ms Hegarty said: “It is something we cannot,
in telling the truth of the events, ignore. We just cannot do that.”
The Museum of Free Derry said it is “totally unrepentant” about
including those names, which it says it had always displayed. The museum
received half a million pounds in state funds last year.
A spokesperson for the Bloody Sunday Trust said they would consider the
petition, but insisted:
“It is clear from the displays within the Museum that we are highly
critical of the role of the British Army and RUC in Derry. It is what
the Museum is about telling the story of the Free Derry from the
perspective on those who lived through it.
“This display of the names of the dead had been part of the museum for
the past ten years. We have never received one single complaint until
now.”
Posted by Jim on
In a move which has brought the two nationalist parties in the North
closer than ever politically, the SDLP is backing calls for a border
poll on Irish reunification.
The leader of the SDLP, Colum Eastwood, said a poll on a united Ireland
within the Six Counties should be called after the Brexit negotiations
are concluded.
Launching his party’s Westminster election manifesto in Belfast on
Tuesday, Colum Eastwood said a referendum on Irish unity would “need to
happen after Brexit”.
He did not give a specific date for the vote, but suggested it should
take place when the negotiations on taking Britain out of the European
Union are completed.
Previously the party had said the time ‘wasn’t right’ for the move,
which was advocated by Sinn Fein before the outcome of the Brexit
referendum brought new momentum to the campaign.
Mr Eastwood said the SDLP would campaign on creating an “Ireland based
on reconciliation and working together”.
He referred to how the British government accepted that, in the event of
a vote for unity, the Six Counties would rejoin the EU. Mr Eastwood
claimed that it was pressure from Foyle MP Mark Durkan which convinced
the British Brexit secretary David Davis to accept that the North of
Ireland was “the only place in these islands with an automatic path back
into the EU as a result of the principle of consent and the Good Friday
Agreement”.
“While others were waving banners, the SDLP made the prospect of a
successful unity referendum much more possible because a Border poll is
no longer solely the project of Irish nationalism but of pro-European
internationalism,” he declared.
“We think there’s now a route for actually winning a border poll,” he
said. “In terms of timescale, I think it would need to happen after
Brexit when we see the dust settling.”
The two parties’ varying approach to the parliaments in London and
Dublin is now the only difference between them on the major
constitutional questions. The SDLP does not contest elections in the 26
Counties, while Sinn Fein MPs refuse to take their seats at Westminster.
The SDLP leader again defended the position of his party’s MPs, who must
pledge their allegiance to the British Crown before they can take their
seats and salaries at Westminster. Mr Eastwood criticised Sinn Fein for
refusing to take its seats in the House of Commons, particularly at a
time when he said there was real prospect of a hung British parliament.
He said the political calculus of the Westminster election was simple:
“A DUP seat will only add to Tory numbers – a Sinn Fein seat won’t even
get counted.”
The SDLP is struggling to hold on to its three seats held by three
former leaders, Alasdair McDonnell in South Belfast, Mark Durkan in
Foyle and Margaret Ritchie in South Down. It is under pressure from Sinn
Fein in Foyle and South Down, and from the DUP in South Belfast.
Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams welcomed the SDLP’s change in stance in
favour of an Irish Unity referendum.
“Sinn Fein have called for such a vote to be held within the next five
years,” he said. “All parties that claim to support Irish Unity,
including Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, and Labour, should now make the call
for referendums North and South in line with the provisions of the Good
Friday Agreement.
“The imposition of Brexit underlines the undemocratic nature of
partition and its impact on citizens, the economy, and public services.
A Unity Referendum is an opportunity for the people to have their say
and to build a new, united, and agreed Ireland.
“So, parties should support the call and make the case for unity.”
However, launching the Conservatives’ ‘Northern Ireland’ manifesto,
British Direct Ruler James Brokenshire again declared the conditions for
calling a Border poll on unification were “not remotely satisfied”.
“I remain satisfied on the basis of all reliable indicators of the
continued support for the devolved administration, the principles and
the structures and institutions that are underpinned within the Belfast
Agreement (1998) and its successors, and I am very clear that the
requirements for a border poll are not remotely satisfied,” he said