Don't go so much myself now. Have only been to one match this season. Against the Glens at the Oval. A couple of the mates are regular attenders and are in a Supporters Club. I see them on a Saturday night and they keep me in the picture. The weather gets a bit better I'll make the effort

The religious and national objections could be reduced,by careful design of institutions. But the economic objections are beyond the capacity of tHe Republic of Ireland to meet unaided. Page 161

De Valera.like other traditional nationalists,believed that the unionists were really Irish,and would come to recognize the fact if the British prop was withdrawn. However,the belief that the unionists were really Irish was not the only weapon in De Valera's armoury. He would not abandon his stand even if the unionists rejected unity,because in his view the territoral unity of Ireland took precedence over their wishes. Page 131

The economic burden has been examined earlier in this chapter. The political burden could be massive also,as resentful Protestants and radicalized Catholics joined a State which has adapted its adminstration and its party system to mesh comfortably with its political culture. As Tom Garvin has put it (1988,109)

'If such an offer[of a united Ireland] were to be seriously and publicly made by the British goverment.....it would have devastating,and possibly destabilising effects on the Republic...The structure of the Dublin state is predicated on the unspoken assumption of indefinite continuance of partition,as its party system. Furthermore,the Republic has developed a coporate identity of its own that sudden reunification would threaten,an anology would be requiring the United States to absorb Mexico.'

Why then is the claim maintained? Conor Cruise O'Brien,in his book 'Neighbours' (1980,45),has suggested that to retain it has advantages from the point of view of politics in the Republic.

'It gives equivocal voice to equivocal aspirations. It leaves Britain with the responsibility for Northern Ireland - indefinitely. It leaves the goverment of the Republic free to criticize Britain's discharge of those responsibilities - also indefinitely. This combination has a powerful,though unavowed,appeal to certain shrewd political minds. Page 171

Padraig O'Malley (1983,357) has gone so far as to suggest that there cannot be peace until the south confronts its own reality and steps away from the dream of unification. Page 171

Just as the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is primarily just that,and cannot be explained as an artefact of some outside interference,so the conflict between the communities in Northern Ireland is just that,and cannot primarily explained by the interference of either Britain or the Republic of Ireland. Page 172

Unionists and nationalists ideologies,in their traditional forms,were irreconcilably opposed. Nationalists insisted that the State of Northern Ireland was illegitmate,and that the blame lay with Britain for dividing the Irish nation. Unionists retorted that they were a distinct people from the nationalists of the south,and that the blame for the continued conflict lay with the nationalists for refusing to accept that fact. Page 172

The alternative way of looking at N.I. is to see it as one of the many areas in the world where two groups intermingle - in relative peace as in the South Tyrol or Malaysia,with greater bitterness as in the Lebanon,Sri Lanka,or the territories occupied by Israel. 'Ethnic Conflict -Zones' can often offer more intractable situations than colonies do. A colonial situation can be ended by the departure of the imperial power,but an ethnic conflict may remain as long as the two groups exist. Indeed, in many places the departure of the imperial power has been followed by a worsening of ethnic tensions (e.g. Nigeria,Sri Lanka, Cyprus, Lebanon). There does seem to be an implicit majority view in the literature that, while the 'colony' model illustrates some features of the N.I. problem,the 'ethnic conflict-zone' model is more generally appropriate. Page 179

Indeed Farrell himself has subsequently modified his position. In his more recent work 'Arming the Protestants' (1983) he notes that 'lower-class discontent with the Unionist leadership often expressed itself in a more extreme sectarianism than that of of the pragmatic leaders(p.vi). In other words he has conceded that, if the Protestant working-class broke lose from middle-class leadership,it might move,not towards anything like Irish nationalism,but in the opposite direction. Page 181

O'Brien brings out Connolly's difficulty in dealing with the Protestant working class of north-east Ireland,who so stubbornly refused to behave in the way that Connolly said they ought. Page 184

'One Island Two Nations' (1985) by a lecturer in geography at Maynooth,D.G Pringle. This work answers the question in its title by stating emphatically that Ireland does contain two nations. The author offers two alternative ways of deciding what is a nation,which he describes as the checklist approach,and the self definition approach (pp.30-40). Whichever one uses,he concludes,the answer is the same. He offers little comfort to nationalists and traditional marxists by saying that the two nations crystallized in the the nineteenth century,and that the material conditions which led their creation are now receding. To some extent he is banging at an open door;as was noted in Chapter 6,virtually no one who has put themselves to the discipline of researching Northern Ireland still defends the one-nation theory. If a criticism can be made on his book - and indeed of the BICO defenders of the two-nation theory - it is that they put the case too much in economic terms. To stress economic divergence as the fundamental reason for the developement of a different nationality in the north-east of the island from the rest of the island may be to place too little weight on cultural factors. If economics outweighed culture,one might have expected the Protestant farmers west of the Bann, whose material interests were much closer to those of their Catholic neighbours than they were to the workers and industrialists of the Belfast area,to have been drawn to national Ireland,but in fact they were quite as staunch unionists as any other Protestants in Ulster. However the book serves a purpose. Anyone who still believes in the one-nation hypothesis will find its arguments difficult to overcome. Page 191

Richard Rose's 'Governing Without Consensus' (1971) can in its theoretical sections be taken as a sustained attack on Marxist and other economic interpretations of the Northern Ireland problem. Rose's key claim is that the conflict is so intractable because it is NOT economic. Economic conflicts,about the share-out of material benefits,are bargainable: conflicts about religion and nationality are non-bargainable and therefore much harder to resolve. Page 192

Secondly.it supposes that,if northern Protestant workers were to bolt from control of their unionist bosses,they would bolt in a united-Ireland direction. This also seems unlikely. The record suggests that,when these workers did bolt,they were more likely to move towards a sectarianism more extreme than that of the unionist leadership. McCann,like Farrell,underestimates the tenacity and the autonomy of the Protestant workers distinct identity. As the troubles developed,it became increasingly difficult to ignore that identity.

As the troubles developed,it became increasingly difficult to ignore that identity. Traditional Marxism,like traditional nationalism,was being eroded,not just by the tides of historical scholarship,but also by the course of events. The theories which had comforted Marxists and nationalists - that Protestant workers did not really believe in unionist ideology,but had been bamboozled by the bosses(as Marxists would say) or by the British(as nationalists would put it) - became increasingly implausible in view of the fury shown by unionist workers at the civil rights movement and,later,the IRA campaign. Page 182

Liam de Paor's 'Divided Ulster' (1970) was,at the time it came out,the best succinct statement of traditional marxist view. By the time a revised edition was published the following year,however, the author was showing signs of second thoughts. In the preface to that edition(de paor 1971,p,xix0, he stated that 'there is a unionist case', a point which he had not conceded before. In a column called 'Roots',which he contributed to the Irish Times in the mid-1970s,he went further,conceding the reality of the separate Protestant identity. One of the most recent books is entitled 'The Peoples of Ireland (1986). The use of the plural indicates the rejection of the traditional marxist( and traditional nationalist) view that there is only one people in Ireland. Page 186.