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Meanwhile, on John Bull's Other Island...

"Eventually", probably, "soon", no. Too many agin' up north. The big problem with Sinn Féin is that they meet the classic definition of a fanatic, a person with both feet firmly planted in the air. They have simply taken a united Ireland as a self-evident given, and have never tried to persuade their Unionist counterparts of the advantages of reunification. As a result, they have a lot of work to do. They have, in effect, fouled their own nest by their intransigent, holier-than-thou behaviour.

I'm not a big fan either, but in their defence, it was quite a battle for them to get to the stage where they were eventually treated as equals - or at least a force to be reckoned with albeit begrudgingly - by the DUP. Their electoral success with the more moderate Nationalists in the North was largely due to being seen as the only ones prepared to stand up to the DUP and take them on. I do take your point though - if they want to move forward from here under the current structure, there's going to be a need for both SF and the DUP to figure out how to work together.

There is another view mind you, that the political 'Power sharing' structure in the North was a temporary fix, and the two sides are still so divided at a fundamental level that the Stormont bodies won't be able to fix it in any foreseeable future. I reckoned the longer term compromise solution would be found somewhere around allowing NI to take its place in the larger EU without being forced to choose between British or Irish rule. That's kind of buggered now again though :(
 
What a po faced, devoid of joy, Cromwellian, ascetic, creationist, bigoted pack of.... It takes some doing to make Hitler and Stalin look like the chuckle brothers but the DUP manage it! They need to chill out, get some Guinness down their necks and learn the meaning of the craic!

Quite how both sides manage to keep an argument over different brands of the same imaginary sky wizard going for 400 years is mind boggling, while I'm at it.... if they're all so besotted with religion then what about the ten commandments? "Love thy neighbour" and "Thou shalt not kill" spring to mind...

And if I were a bull dog I'd be suing over the constant comparisons with Arlene's face!

There you misunderstand things up North. It has now almost nothing to do with religion - hasn't had for a very long time. There remain echoes of the intolerant religion of the 16th - 17th centuries, reinforced by the Calvinist tendencies of a large chunk of Northern Protestantism. This lingered into the 20th century - the famous cry of "Home rule is Rome rule!" during the Home Rule debates just prior to the First World War. However, it wasn't really the fear of being dominated by Catholicism that was the problem, it was the fear of being swallowed by what the Northern Unionists perceived as a race of inferior people.

Essentially, what you're really looking at is a tribal conflict, in which the religious affectations (and they are often only that) are mere labels affixed to two different tribes. One tribe (Prod/Unionist/Loyalist) has been top dog for a very long time, and is determined to stay there. The other tribe (Catholic/Nationalist/Republican) has been downtrodden and kept in check by the Loyalist tribe, the latter aided and abetted by Westminster (usually by ignoring it and wishing it would therefore go away), but has suddenly seen a glimpse of something better and has sought to grasp it - and has naturally met resistance from the Loyalist tribe. In a way, it's analogous to the situation in the USA, where Trump has played on the fears of the white population that they're about to be swamped by an inferior alien tribe.
 
There you misunderstand things up North. It has now almost nothing to do with religion - hasn't had for a very long time. There remain echoes of the intolerant religion of the 16th - 17th centuries, reinforced by the Calvinist tendencies of a large chunk of Northern Protestantism. This lingered into the 20th century - the famous cry of "Home rule is Rome rule!" during the Home Rule debates just prior to the First World War. However, it wasn't really the fear of being dominated by Catholicism that was the problem, it was the fear of being swallowed by what the Northern Unionists perceived as a race of inferior people.

Essentially, what you're really looking at is a tribal conflict, in which the religious affectations (and they are often only that) are mere labels affixed to two different tribes. One tribe (Prod/Unionist/Loyalist) has been top dog for a very long time, and is determined to stay there. The other tribe (Catholic/Nationalist/Republican) has been downtrodden and kept in check by the Loyalist tribe, the latter aided and abetted by Westminster (usually by ignoring it and wishing it would therefore go away), but has suddenly seen a glimpse of something better and has sought to grasp it - and has naturally met resistance from the Loyalist tribe. In a way, it's analogous to the situation in the USA, where Trump has played on the fears of the white population that they're about to be swamped by an inferior alien tribe.

Yup. We grew up in what was effectively an apartheid society with your race being determined not by the colour of your skin, but whether you were Orange or Green.
 
Yup. We grew up in what was effectively an apartheid society with your race being determined not by the colour of your skin, but whether you were Orange or Green.
The Unionist/Loyalist mentality is typified by my late maternal grandmother, who was a bitter old Prod from the Shankill Road. She was a working girl during the Home Rule bills and the Troubles that led to Partition. She would describe someone as "awful Fenian-looking" (if they looked even slightly southern European), and would say that, since Catholics were "awful throughother" (dirty and untidy), there was no point in giving them decent housing, as they'd only keep pigs in the parlour and coal in the bathtub.

Ironically, if you now go up the Shankill and Falls Roads, it's the Shankill that looks, well, throughother, while the Falls has raised its game enormously and now looks rather spick and span! It's worth taking one of Belfast's "glider" buses (bendy buses that run on certain routes)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_(Belfast)

up the Falls for a look.
 
The Unionist/Loyalist mentality is typified by my late maternal grandmother, who was a bitter old Prod from the Shankill Road. She was a working girl during the Home Rule bills and the Troubles that led to Partition. She would describe someone as "awful Fenian-looking" (if they looked even slightly southern European), and would say that, since Catholics were "awful throughother" (dirty and untidy), there was no point in giving them decent housing, as they'd only keep pigs in the parlour and coal in the bathtub.

Ironically, if you now go up the Shankill and Falls Roads, it's the Shankill that looks, well, throughother, while the Falls has raised its game enormously and now looks rather spick and span! It's worth taking one of Belfast's "glider" buses (bendy buses that run on certain routes)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_(Belfast)

up the Falls for a look.
Everything you are posting on this thread I would agree with. NI is similar to Brexit with a range of people across the spectrum blindly married to their position which unfortunately is mired in past that was never very nice anyway.
 
The Unionist/Loyalist mentality is typified by my late maternal grandmother, who was a bitter old Prod from the Shankill Road. She was a working girl during the Home Rule bills and the Troubles that led to Partition. She would describe someone as "awful Fenian-looking" (if they looked even slightly southern European), and would say that, since Catholics were "awful throughother" (dirty and untidy), there was no point in giving them decent housing, as they'd only keep pigs in the parlour and coal in the bathtub.

Ironically, if you now go up the Shankill and Falls Roads, it's the Shankill that looks, well, throughother, while the Falls has raised its game enormously and now looks rather spick and span! It's worth taking one of Belfast's "glider" buses (bendy buses that run on certain routes)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_(Belfast)

up the Falls for a look.

Haven't heard 'throughother' (or as they say in Belfast - thoo'other) in a long while. Great word :)

Often had to explain it to folk in the South here - usually told them it's the state a thing is in when it requires intervention to make it 'A bit more Protestant looking'.
 
Knowledgeable and well-respected Julian Smith sacked as NI secretary.

Conservatives gearing up for culture war over prosecution of Bloody Sunday murders. Good for Sinn Fein I guess.
 
Do you mean she had a job, or are you actually using the vernacular meaning of that phrase tones?
There's a vernacular meaning, is there? Sorry, wasn't aware of that. Like so many working-class girls in Belfast, she went straight from primary school into one of the many linen mills that were so long a feature of Belfast. At one point, down near Agnes Street, the Shankill and the Falls are only about 400M apart, and the mill was about equidistant between them. Both Catholic and Protestant girls worked in it, and, at the time of the 1912 Home Rule debate and the signing of the Ulster Covenant:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulster_Covenant

there was considerable tension between the two sides. One girl described Granny as an "oul' Orange cat", to which she (with red hair and temper to match) snarled back, "*Lift the orange cat's tail and kiss its a**e!"
 
Knowledgeable and well-respected Julian Smith sacked as NI secretary.

Conservatives gearing up for culture war over prosecution of Bloody Sunday murders. Good for Sinn Fein I guess.
As with Trump, so with Johnson’s Tory Government- “ the law means what we say it does”.
 


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