The Constitution still rules the election roost.

During the campaigning stage of the election there was the spin that politics here are now about bread and butter issues. This was poppycock. There was a nationalist/Republican green sectarian constitutional vote along with a unionist orange
sectarian constitutional vote. The sectarian constitutional nature of the campaign came to the fore with Tom Elliot’s outburst about a foreign nation when in Omagh. Legal purists may argue using the British Nationality Act1948 and the Irish Act 1949 that Tom is wrong but these acts simply bring the law into line with the reality that the Irish and British people don’t regard each other as alien. But Tom was simply expressing the popular loyalist perception that the Republican Tricolour is the flag of a foreign nation. The Acts noted do nothing to dispel that popular loyalist perception and the Irish Tricolour is as foreign for them as the French and Italian tricolours. Once I had to post a parcel to Dublin and I expressed surprise at the cost. The clerk explained that Dublin is in a foreign country and that was the reason. It costs the same to post a letter to Donegal as to Germany or Moscow so if the Post Office treats the Republic as foreign why shouldn’t Loyalists? The culprits in dividing Ireland into two separate foreign statelets are Republicans not Loyalists. I know Republicans who regard the Queen as foreign and if Martin Maguinness doesn’t why won’t he meet her? All in all the constitutional conflict still rules the roost in Omagh. Tom Elliot has a low opinion of Sinn Fein. There are many like Tom in both communities. In a free country why can’t such people express their opinion? The British/Irish problem is deeply rooted in the Constitution and can only be resolved in a full-blooded reform of U.K. Constitution to a Federal Kingdom Constitution.

Michael Gillespie Derry Federal Unionist-Early Sinn Fein