We have to show that everybody's best interest lies in stopping London controlling our affairs.
Even if we set up an Assembly, what power do we have over our financial or foreign policy for instance? Can we decide whether to support Washington or Baghdad in the Middle East? What power have we over whether there will be water charges or not? Over the health of our health services? Can we make our own defence policy? The answer is that we do not have power at all, even if we set up an Assembly of our own elected representatives. This has to change. And the change must be radical, fundamental, basic.
Either we have power or we don't, and it is an insult to our intelligence and our abilities if we do not. And having control over our own affairs is what both nationalism and republicanism are about. It seems almost useless to try to convince most unionist and loyalist people that their best interest lies in shifting real power away from London. They are agents of London, nothing more. Historically and presently they are London's agents and enforcers in Ireland. They have never even talked about the possibility of having control over our own foreign policy, our own financial affairs, our military policy.
Such an idea is completely outside their political imagining. It should not be outside the political determination of the rest of us. When they have the choice of discussing such control over our own affairs or talking about whether men in bowler hats should walk up and down the street they have always chosen the latter of these subjects. And this is not accidental.
Loyalists are very obedient people and they have been led by one set of masters after another to talk about bowler hats not because bowler hats are the most important but because they distract people's attention from what is most important – who will control our lives, ourselves or a London-based bureaucracy which is both boring and crass.
How do you get loyalists to understand that controlling our own affairs in Ireland is better than having London control us? You don't, not in a community where the leading official of one of the churches joins the House of Lords and failed politicians rush to join him, where people refuse to elect those who will uphold their dignity and choose instead those who want the very notion of their dignity to be defined and limited by civil servants in London. If we are to have any dignity left we must manage our own affairs and that means curbing the ability of London administrators to dictate all the policies that govern our lives.
Most loyalists will never see this, so it is useless to try to persuade them. They are too used to being led by people who brought them up one blind alley after another. Paisley, with his nonsense about popes and his low quality invective; Trimble with his saying one thing and doing another and ending up doing nothing; church leaders who are so afraid of their secret societies that everything they do is governed by whether it will please the grand masters; business people who are busy running their businesses on an all-Ireland basis and are afraid to say so out loud; people who allow the foolish of this world, the IMC and the Parades Commission included, to tell them how they should behave in their own streets.
From those who managed our affairs during the past 80 years, we have learned how to touch our forelocks to every minor official who comes in from Lower Bletherl- in-the-Wold. If ever we get to the point of really managing our own affairs – which is what republicanism is about and should be what all mature decency is about – we must, we simply must, have an honours list and the principal award should be the Order of the Golden Forelock for those who taught us that the only reason for not touching the forelock was the fact that you were on your knees with forehead firmly on the ground.
One of the tasks facing nationalist and republican politicians is to break through the anti-intellectual nonsense imposed on them by BBC, RTé and other media propagandists, and intensify the learning programme based upon the economic, cultural, political advantages of making our own policies. The majority of nationalists and republicans will go for this, and with a handful of converted unionists you could get a majority in favour of democratic government in a few years. Nationalists and republicans engaged in this programme need to keep on setting the agenda. They are being hampered by an appalling lack of intellectual ability in the BBC, RTé and most newspapers. But by insisting on the real issues we can overcome a lot of that nonsense.
In other words, we must not allow the intellectual and moral poverty of the unionist establishment to go on dragging us into their own morass. One day enough of them will see political, economic and cultural sense. Meanwhile, the rest of us have adult persons' work to do. And Irish Protestants whose ancestors faced the same problem with George the Third should be able to understand that.
