We are entitled to vote, to have our vote recognised and to have an administration according to our wishes formed in Ireland's northeast without delay. This right is reinforced by an international agreement.
But we are being refused all this. Is it not urgently necessary then to go to the courts, the European courts eventually, to assert our rights?
It takes a great stretch of imagination to believe Mr Blair or Mr Ahern are committed to that international agreement. If they were they would be helping to achieve a settlement in Ireland. Instead, they are loading their own agreement with conditions which were never in it and are not in it now.
The IRA made no agreements. How could any refusal of theirs invalidate an agreement to which they were not a party? We the voters have rights and even if we voted for the most degraded criminals on earth our wish expressed through the ballot box must prevail. And we most certainly did not do that. What Mr Ahern and Mr Blair are doing is simply preventing our rights from being fulfilled. It is for us and not for them – nobody in the northeast voted for them – to decide who shall manage our affairs.
Demanding that the IRA should give up "criminality" was a cheap trick. No organisation on earth is going to say "we will give up criminality" and both servants of the people, Mr Blair and Mr Ahern, know this. That is why they insist on this demand. Say you are in favour of the agreement and then make it impossible to fulfil it. If Mr Blair and Mr Ahern had really wanted to get a settlement they would not have put the word criminality into their demands – it is as simple as that.
Since people in the northeast did not vote for either of these two politicians they should have no function in such affairs apart from helping us to carry out or own wishes. And our own wishes are expressed in our vote. The goodness or badness of the IRA or any other body is irrelevant.
What can the European or other courts offer me as a voter whose wishes are constantly being thwarted? At least surely the time has come to try and see. If there are not legal means to assert our rights then what use are the courts and the lawyers and the laws of the European Community? Either an international agreement is binding on governments or it is not.
Either we have a right to be heard or we have not. Either I as a citizen of Europe and of Ireland (leaving apart the claim that I am a subject of the British monarch, which is an irrelevancy) have a right to have my vote honoured or I have not. Let's test all these things in the courts.
Dublin and London seem engaged in an exercise to prevent, not to help, the carrying out of the agreement they made. There seems little evidence – apart from some words – that they have any commitment to a reasonable settlement in Ireland. One says that with regret because we have put our trust in people who should have earned our trust rather than have been presented with it free.
Those who make "establishing trust between republicans and unionists" a condition for progress know perfectly well that (1) it is impossible unless unionists change their political and religious views and (2) it was never demanded of any people on earth that they trust each other before adequate political arrangements were made for and by them.
Were the Swiss required to trust each other before making their constitutional arrangements? Not at all. The Americans? No. Did it happen in Ireland in 1920? No. Did any political arrangement we know of have to wait until people trusted each other? If it had it would have waited for ever.
The idea that we cannot have political arrangements until we all trust each other was created some years ago. It was one of a series of impossible conditions put on us to avoid political change. We are still getting them.
"You want political change? Of course, of course, and you shall have it.
"Provided, naturally, Protestants and Catholics come to love and trust each other first. And provided political associations which have prided themselves on their political integrity admit to having been criminals (remember the London-based campaign to criminalise republicans? Now it is appearing in Dublin in a new guise)."
We cannot accept this unhistorical demand. Political arrangements have to be made precisely because people don't agree with each other, don't trust each other. You make political rearrangements to help people who don't trust each other to live together in peace and some prosperity. Mr Ahern knows that. So does Mr Blair. So do we all. The Americans and the Russians , the Belgians, the French and the Germans, the Swiss – all acted accordingly. The Irish are the only people on the face of this earth who are required to love each other before they are allowed to make political arrangements which suit their needs, their potential, their fears, their prejudices.
If Mr Ahern and Mr Blair and their advisers want to be accepted as supporters of the agreement – as they say they are – they will have to show it more clearly than they have done so far. And for goodness sake, can we stop politicians playing such games with people's lives?
