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Sounds like it’s time for a Free Ireland, but at what cost? (unlimited mid root beer)
While I normally don't give the Brits much credit, gotta say NI is not being held in the UK against its collective will. Your imagined cruel English oppressor holding on to land by force, opposing the will of the local population, is out of date in the 21st century.
Almost all Brit politicians would love to be the PM at the time of Irish unification.
Since 1998, the NI Secretary is obliged by treaty to carry out a referendum for unification as soon as polling indicates there's a reasonable chance it would get a yes majority.
It just hasn't happened yet. It probably will, within a few decades.
Watch derry gerls and see it’s being held against its collective will. Just cause you invade, rename the place London-Derry, and fill it with your people so that after centuries of strife when you finally are forced by international pressure into signing the Good Friday agreement (military occupation didn’t work, yeah give ‘em credit for that) which allows for a path to a free Ireland (and do not forget the strife needed to get any free Ireland at all), doesn’t give you a “but they don’t wanna cause they can’t muster the vote cause we’ve filled it with our peeps” ain’t a “out of date in the 21st century” view.
Fuckin travesty they have to have their passport and different coinage to visit relatives on the other side of the border, while still being in their own island. BRITS could just set em loose not do the song and dance “oh the nationalists we planted and stoked for centuries are too many you can’t get the vote ha ha”. Orrrrr if England was gonezo the Welsh and Scots would def let it go
TLDR; git güd, see the unnecessary pain, see Sinn Féin wins parliament seats but does NOT participate in parliament because they know they are being oppressed against their will and will not participate in that system of oppression.
sure, anything's good to get mad about if you just make things up.
what specifically do you have in mind by "set em loose", if not the referendum i talked about?
would you rather the six counties be "handed over" without the consent of the people who live there? how is that less imperialist than the Good Friday Agreement which you seem to be angry about?
a passport is not required to cross the border. never was. you just drive straight through, no stops since the mid-90s. I can tell you've never been to Ireland.
please don't talk to me as if I'm british.
Derry Girls is a great show, I'm glad it's popular, but it isn't a substitute for reality.
Aye missed it on the hard border not reinstated post-Brexit. “Never was” and “mid-90s” (2005 was the last of the military checkpoints; literally not before 1998, the late-90s) is incongruous though!
Gonna skip over the Sin Féin thing? Gonna skip over the systematic displacement and oppression that led to the Troubles that then led to the Good Friday agreement? The resistance does not use bombs anymore, but they still resist
And you skipped the “filled with pro-Brit nationalists for centuries and stoked pro-Brit nationalism for centuries so that the oppressed cannot get a majority”. Orange parades could have been banned easily
Do you see parallels with displacement in the Crimea or the West Bank? How much time does the oppressor need to displace the original populous for it to become “well you can’t kick them out, they live there!” A hundred years probably passes the bar, that’s how it works in the US at least.
Clearly, the Good Friday agreement is the best off-road possible to avoid more bloodshed from either side after centuries of distain and oppression of the Irish. An agreement that was forced onto the British gov by systematic resistance for decades. They don’t get a “everything’s great, the British in modern times should be lauded” after an armed resistance forced the international community put enough pressure on the British government to make them offer an agreement to end their colonization.
Indeed, the Brits could have just relinquished them over and set up a de-colonization program for extreme British nationalists who didn’t want to be Irish. The main thing to pull from derry girls is that in spite of it all most there just want to live, and just creating a unified Ireland would end it there and then. But the British nationalists might start bombing then, so yeah Good Friday slow roll with continued resistance to British rule is the way to go - but it has not ended that pain, only prolonged.
Anyway it’s clear to me that the sentiment
While I normally don’t give the Brits much credit, gotta say NI is not being held in the UK against its collective will. Your imagined cruel English oppressor holding on to land by force, opposing the will of the local population, is out of date in the 21st century.
is not in good faith. It is not out of date, just because the British military isn’t shooting people there anymore doesn’t mean it’s hunky-dory. (hunky-derry? Hehehh)
This speaks to the systemic racism issues present in the US, which parallel the Irish experience in Northern Ireland to an extent. Because minorities were red-lined for decades and denied access to various privileges, now that they mostly aren’t (https://virginiamercury.com/2024/06/06/black-womans-bid-to-buy-virginia-beach-home-faces-illegal-barrier-echoes-of-the-past/ comes to mind) do we declare success? It is once more clear to me that we do not just get out the banner once the paper is signed, but rather continue to make noise to ensure we’re always moving towards removing barriers that discriminate and oppress. E.g., the 1964 and ‘65 civil and voting rights acts required by law that minority discrimination and oppression is abolished - by 1990 was that systemic discrimination and oppression gone? Nop. By 2024 is that systemic discrimination and oppression gone? Nopppp
“please don’t talk to me as if I’m british” is doing the most btw
"never" was specifically about the need for a passport, not the existence of stops. Stops were rare after the mid-90s, intermittently put up when there was a local bomb scare.
i'm "skipping" points that aren't relevant to the original claim, that today NI would be "free" if only England wasn't in charge. My point was that the GFA's principle of consent is respected by both the UK and the Republic of Ireland, and so the ruling class of England is not today holding NI against their collective will. Derry Girls had the GFA referendum in the final episode - please remember that was 26 years ago already, society has changed massively since then.
The main issue for most nationalist-leaning people (btw, in Ireland, nationalist always means Irish nationalist. nobody says "british nationalist", you say unionist or loyalist instead) these days is waiting for the Republic's health-care system to match the NHS in terms of affordability and quality. Everyday issues like that - most people in the north have a distrust of "the flag" being the most important issue.
Getting into alternate-history "could have ..." ideas doesn't change the real today. Nobody here suggested that, (for example) Orange marches were dealt with well, or Ireland has been treated well in history.
I did ask you what you meant by "set em loose", and didn't get an answer. Also "Welsh and Scots would def let it go" - again, what means exactly do you believe England is using to not let it go, in 2024? The NI Secretary will hold a referendum as soon as public polling indicates the time is right. Your "de-colonization" plan sounds like ethnic cleansing of the Ulster-Scots population who have been there since before the Mayflower reached America.
I do agree wholeheartedly that action should be taken ASAP to undo what Russia and Israel have been doing to expand their territories, while we're still dealing with the actual settlers, not their great-great-great-etc grandchildren.
You’re real pissy about the free Ireland joke if England was yeeted into the æther. Yeah, you think if England ceased to be suddenly (at the cost of unlimited Mugs brand root beer) Wales and Scotland - also oppressed peoples forced to conform to English culture and language - wouldn’t just end the UK as it is? Which would leave Northern Ireland without a handler. The entire premise of this is me-me is a what if England ceased to be in exchange for less root beer.
I made my case that your original quoted thesis was false and I succeeded at that. No, the pain isn’t visceral anymore - but it’s there. Just as minorities in the US suffer slights despite the equality of the law (and consistent work is needed to remove discrimination, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Police_Department#Demographics), so do the oppressed in Northern Ireland https://www.belfastlive.co.uk/news/northern-ireland-catholics-make-up-27385212 .
LOL if you believe that I’ve got a bridge to sell you.