Loyalist Ireland

Lets Include Protestant Loyalist Ireland.

In the letter 5th March J A Barnwell Dublin quotes Parnell thus: -

“No man has the right to fix the boundaries to the march of a nation.”

History in Ireland has demonstrated these words to be rhetorical bombast. Ireland as it is now constituted is not a nation (and isn’t likely to be) but is comprised of two statelets a 26 county statelet constituted as a Republic and a 6 county statelet constituted as being under the Crown. In this quote from Parnell J A Barnwell is trotting out the outworn shibboleth that Parnell was a Republican. Parnell was a Home Rule constitutional nationalist and if he had been offered a government for Ireland under the Crown he would have grabbed it with both hands. The same could be said of Pearse prior to the lunacy of 1916.

J A Barnwell favours self determination (so do I) but which self is to determine the destiny of Ireland? Is it to be a Catholic Republican self alone? Like all Republicans J A Barnwell has a blind spot when it comes to Protestant Loyalist Ireland. They don’t seem to exist but they do. Has that community not got the same right to determine the destiny of Ireland equal to Catholic Republicans? A hard-nosed politician would concede that they do. Since the Protestant Loyalist community in Ireland should have equal rights in determining the destiny of the nation then the reformed Crown will have to be part of it as Head of State of the Sovereign Nation of all Ireland within a Federal Kingdom. That is pragmatic realism far removed from the Republican dreamland of J A Barnwell in Dublin.

Michael Gillespie