Re: Northern Ireland Unionist Leader Meets With Prime Minister of Ireland
The only way there will be a United Ireland this side of the 3rd millenium, short of a nationwide insurrection, is for the 26 counties to rejoin the U.K.
London will NEVER (to quote the Rev. Ian Paisley) give up it's hold on Ireland. It simply makes no sense for them to do so.
On the other hand, Dublin's politicians are nothing but British lackeys and traitors who would as soon as sell Ireland's independence out to the first bidder.
What has the GFA done?
The IRA has disbanded. Sinn Fein has recognised the legitimacy of British occupation in the north and has joined both the British political system as well as aids the British Security forces in neutralising Republican resistance. Dublin has given up it's historic claim to the north and accepted partition and the division of Ireland. Meanwhile, the Loyalists are still deciding whether they should even bother to disarm their paramilitary assassins. In the background, imprisonment without trial and other mockeries of justice and democracy continue as part of official British policy in Ireland.
There is absolutely no need for nationalists to get excited.
Things are as dismal as ever they were, and any Irish optimistic about the GFA are living in a dream world fuelled by wishful thinking.
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The traditions of the Irish people are the oldest of any race in Europe north and west of the Alps, and they themselves are the longest settled on their own soil
- Edmund Curtis (A History of Ireland: From Earliest Times to 1922)
The Irish are one of the most ancient nations that I know of at this end of the world, and are from as mighty a race as the world ever brought forth.
For it is certain that Ireland hath had the use of letters very anciently and long before England; that they had letters anciently is nothing doubtful, for the Saxons of England are said to have their letters and learning, and learned men, from the Irish.
- Edmund Spenser (writer, and British Government Official in Ireland, AD 1596).
The renaissance began in Ireland seven hundred years before it was known in Italy. And Armagh, the ecclesiastical capital of Ireland, was at one time the metropolis of civilisation.
- Arsene Darmesteter, Professor of Old French and Literature
Ireland can indeed lay claim to a great past; she can not only boast of having been the birthplace and abode of high culture in the fifth and sixth centuries . . . but also of having made strenous efforts in the seventh and up to the tenth century to spread her learning among the German and Romance peoples, thus forming the actual fountain of our present continental civilisation.
- Heinrich Zimmer, Professor of Celtic and Sanskrit, Member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences
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