New Thinking

Ireland needs new thinking and a new constitution.
In his pep talk to the assembly David Cameron said nothing new. He told us yet again that the constitutional issue is settled. David should try selling that to the dissidents or if Sinn Fein members were surveyed on the matter how many would agree with the Prime Minster? But the constitutional issue is alive and active in Limavady. Boyd Douglas displayed a Union Jack in the council chamber and setting the cat among the constitutional pigeons reduced the chamber to disarray. The Assembly functions on the fallacy that the constitutional issue has gone away in the GFA. This agreement joins at the hip left wing Marxist Republicans with right wing Monarchists. This toxic constitutional cocktail would be poured down the sink in any other democracy but here a hoodwinked people have to drink it because our numbskull sectarian politicians can’t serve anything more palatable.

What is missing in Ireland is new thinking about the country. We have Republicans flogging the dead horse of an all Ireland Republic while Union Jack Unionists flog the dead horse of a United Kingdom. Both have been doing this for over 200 years. Isn’t it time the beasts were declared dead and buried? We now find that a young Sinn Fein Mayor of Belfast is displaying in the City Hall the failed Republicanism of the United Irishmen along with the failed 1916 Proclamation that partitioned the island. This young man is an arch Irish conservative without a new thought in his head. There is unashamed new thinking which sees the sectarian British/Irish problem as constitutional, the constitution needing reform in a new constitution expressed in The National Government of Ireland Act modernising the Kingdom as a Federal Kingdom for all. Where there is no new thinking the people perish. In the deadwood of old conservative thinking, people like Ronan Kerr perish.


Michael Gillespie

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