It is hard to understand why the unionists don't go for independence from London. They have absolutely no power as they are. They are told what to do. They cannot make a financial policy of their own. Nor a foreign policy.
Nor a law and order policy. Nor an industrial development policy. Nor an education policy. Nor any policy. They are just told what to do. Sometimes they do it, if it suits them, and often they do not do it. And after the last few weeks even they must understand that disobeying London will be punished. Those Who Must Be Obeyed demand a heavy price from the disobedient, including their supporters.
Our unionist friends sit in a House of Commons (among the common folk in the British system), a selected few of them get to the Lords House where they have even less power than in the Commons and because they are subjects they are told what to do and what to do is never decided by them.
How much they get to spend is decided by someone else. Where and how it will be spent is dictated by someone else.
You wonder sometimes why, just for once, they don't long to have something of their own, a foreign policy of their own, an education policy of their own, any policy at all of their own. At a recent West Belfast meeting a man in the audience cried out to them: :Have you no ambition?"
In other countries people are demanding that they make their own policies. Not unionists. The idea of being a subject is so attractive that it drives out all notion of independence. So it is strange that unionists positively want not to be independent. But then, nationalists and republicans have to think what it would be like if unionists did go for independence and if Ireland were re-united and free from London domination. The power unionists would have in that case sometimes frightens me. Not waking me up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat or anything like that, but it can be a bit frightening, no matter how much goodwill you have for their people and parties.
Because when Ireland is no longer under London control, what will the political line-up be in Ireland? Just think.
The present day unionists would join with Fine Gael and both would for the first time have a real chance of arguing for Ireland to come back within a British constitutional connection.
That would be economically and socially and democratically awful, but if that is what unionists want, they would have a better chance of arguing for it – if they could manage the intellectual expertise involved in arguing for it – as members of a political group working with other Irish political groups with the same ideas. After all, Fine Gael is basically British unionist and very high conservative. Then the PDs, with Michael McDowell and Mary Harney and such – the unionists would be very much at home with them.
And it is at this point that fear really whets the brow with honest and worried sweat: just think of the power a coalition of present day unionists, old-time Fine Gael and ambitious Progressive Democrats would have in Ireland. Whew! Of course, while that frightens the life out of some people it need never happen because the unionists are not going for it.
Please don't ask me why. But if they did, the rest of us would have some heavy thinkng to do to make sure we did not sink back to mid-nineteenth century politics.
Some of the SDLP would find a pleasant home with the Irish Labour Party or Fianna Fáil, at least until such time as a more nationally minded slightly left conservative alliance came into view.
Sinn Féin and any other group which favours more radical politics would have a heavy time struggling against all that instinctive and pragmatic conservatism.
And with a real possibility of being a real government rather than the weak end of a government which they can never control but which always controls them, the present day unionists would have real power over Irish affairs.
For the first time. And isn't that what they have wanted for so long? Fianna Fáil would have to face into that Berlin wall of politics and become what it should have been all along, a party open to some radical ideas and with some ambition to make Ireland as independent as it can be, not as subservient as convenient.
Other people's extreme high conservatism could possibly encourage democratic people to vote Sinn Féin and might even cause a really labouring Irish Labour Party to emerge in place of the present one.
Anyway, if unionist people want power in Ireland, the only way of getting it is getting free of London and joining up with people with similar views in Ireland.
When that happens I shall of course be away digging and contemplating the universe in Donegal, far away from some new political alliances which would probably tend to frighten me even more as time went on.
Anyway, the big question we can put to unionists is, Friends, do you really want power in Ireland? Real ability to create a foreign policy not made in London? An educational policy? An economic policy (after all, Ireland has the potential of being one of the most prosperous small countries in the European Union, we said that as long ago as the mid-nineteen eighties but you weren't listening, were you?)
A defence policy for ourselves? A social policy that works? We thought some young DUP people coming through the universities might realise their own potential.
But we were wrong and it never happened. And they are getting too old for it now.
What kind of economics and politics do they study in these universities anyway?
