Free Statism And The Good Old Ira Av Danny Morrison

Writer and commentator Danny Morrison challenges Fianna Fáil, Fine Gaeland the Irish establishment over their attitude to partition and how the closerIreland gets to a border referendum—which could have a profound effect onthe country’s constitutional future—the further they retreat from it.He accuses them of having a ‘Free State’ mentality which he describes aspromoting the idea that the Twenty-Six Counties, the Republic of Ireland, isIreland, a notion they promulgate through their pronounced usage of the termsIreland and Northern Ireland in recent years.Morrison also challenges them on the hollowness of their argument that theIRA had an electoral mandate to wage the War of Independence. He arguesthat the real criteria for the justification of armed struggle were the actualsocial, economic and oppressive political conditions of the time; that the IRAwas preparing for guerrilla warfare before the December 1918 general election,regardless of how well Sinn Féin in would do. Put crudely, in relation to whathappened in the North during our most recent conflict, Fianna Fáil and FineGael’s fallacious attitude is, he says, ‘Our violence was good, yours bad.’Acceptance and recognition of these facts, Morrison says, does not infersupport for the actions of the IRA of modern mainstream republicanism, butdoes show that there are multiple parallels, down to the characteristicallyunseemly, quotidian side of small wars universally which are largely repugnant.Partition, he says, was imposed on the majority of people in Ireland andnorthern nationalists were the main losers and victims. Had the monolithicUlster Unionist Party tried to make nationalists/Catholics feel welcome theycould have, but they didn’t. If they had, the narrative might have been different.