United Ireland Poll - please vote

I live in carrick on Shannon and my boyfriend lives in Omagh I'm up most weekends and wow you can feel the divide up there, goy called a few names as I was from "down south", I would love to see a united ireland

It was inevitable if you had your eyes on dividing the spoils of independence between you, the church and the other party of the upcoming power swap.

The descendants of the people left behind and abandoned to their fate are at the gate Mark and they want their country back.

*By the way, you cannot 'invade' your own country, that's a misnomer or maybe you thought Irish people were living in somebody else's country?

The Brexit referendum contradicts your last sentence.

But yes i understand that some people will want to know the details right down to the minutiae. I caution against embarking something like this because while you can create an extensive list of changes, pages upon pages in fact; the obstructionist will hunt and peck for one single sentence they strongly object to and rubbish the whole thing. Which is why it's better to offer a UI in general terms, leaving details to be worked out afterward.

Yeh Mark...Unionists couldn't 'invade' their own country either.🙄

Off topic Ted.

Why so?

You claim that there was some magical fairytale way that the island could not be partitioned. This is a United Ireland thread after all....

This is the whole problem with exclusionary nationalism. They see territory as theirs, they see others as outsiders.

National identity doesn't need territory, we can be equally Irish in Dublin, London or Belfast.

Dancing on a pin in regards words. Ireland as in the Republic of Ireland is a country. Northern Ireland is not part of the Repub

You advocating the old IRA go into Ulster to fight and defeat the Ulster Volunteers, and to hell with the death and destruction that would have caused.

You also advocated the Irish Defence Forces invade the North the help Nationalists, but the problem with that of course is that the UK is a NATO member and countries like the US would have to step in to help. Not that the UK would have needed it from a military point of view.

It seems you default action is always more war..... Maybe step away from xbox as war is not nice or pretty or glorious.

Yeah, didn't Germany invade Austria on a humanitarian mission? Or was that Poland or Belgium? Can't remember, but I am sure that it was seen as such by them at the time. Certainly the Russians used that excuse to invade Afghanistan back in the day, before the US also used it to take it back.

Sure, Francie, a "humanitarian mission" to invade Northern Ireland back at the heights of the Cold War would have been welcomed by China and Russia before we would have been crushed and become a NATO Protectorate, impoverished for decades. The fantasy warmongering dreams are thankfully no longer a real threat.

Nonsense, my friend. Despite our constitution, we signed up to recognising the border when we joined the United Nations, you seem to forget that. A "humanitarian mission" as you describe it would be considered an act of war under international law and NATO would have been entitled to take any action to defend their territory they wished to up to and including nuclear annihilation at the time.

Thank God there was nobody stupid enough to go ahead with such an idiotic idea at the time.

Another British/Unionist centric view?????

Are you kidding? It was the view of the Irish government back then, who wisely decided against a stupid humanitarian mission that would only have led to more deaths.

Yours is the stray opinion on this one, the fantasy dreaming of an exclusionary republican with a predisposition to supporting violent solutions for political issues. Complete and utter fantasy, as this historian accurately recounts. No doubt the government had to consider it, and did, but the wise course of action was taken.

"The taoiseach asked the army for an assessment and he received a memorandum stating that the Irish army could commit a maximum of 2,500 troops for an incursion. An Irish intervention force might have faced a maximum of 21,500 British soldiers, UDR and RUC trained in the use of firearms. Unsurprisingly, the Irish army warned of ‘disastrous consequences’ for an intervention force on the basis of limited manpower."

"As Jack Lynch accurately told an emotional Fianna Fáil Árd Fheis in 1970, the Irish army did not have the means to intervene, and his policy in relation to partition was to seek unity by consent. An Irish army incursion into Northern Ireland would have ended in two possible ways: either withdrawal or total destruction. The most likely British response would have been the issuing of a withdrawal ultimatum. Irrespective of the hypothetical, what is certain is that Jack Lynch placed the stability, security and economic prosperity of the Irish state above any potentially ruinous irredentist impulses."

The historian accurately reports that the Irish government considered your idea of a humanitarian mission, the likely response, the likely casualties and wisely decided it was a stupid idea. From the article:

"Military planners viewed intervention with clear apprehension and knew that an incursion without an attainable political objective would be counter-productive to Irish interests. They recognised the difficulty of justifying an incursion and realised that internationally the Republic of Ireland might be seen as an aggressor, with negative political and public opinion influencing ‘the outcome of any operations undertaken’."

"Army planners recommended an incursion lasting ‘24 hours’, the minimum length of time required to create an ‘international incident’. Despite envisioning such a small-scale, short-term incursion, the army gave a grim assessment that it could expect to sustain ‘considerable casualties’."

I am not surprised that you are refusing to discuss this anymore. As for never advocating violence, you have advocated that the Irish Army would go into Northern Ireland on a humanitarian mission and what would you expect them to do when the first RUC man they met fired upon them? Retreat without returning fire? How laughable would that have been? What if it was the first farmer they met with a shotgun? What would have been the headline? "Irish Army retreats in fear of hick farmer with shotgun"? Every peacekeeping force is authorised to use violence, so anyone who calls for a peacekeeping force is advocating violence, that is the mission, as it would have been in 1970. The difference is, in today's world, those peacekeeping missions usually have a mandate from both sides.

Do you know what a 'signaled humanitarian mission' is?

If an RUC man fired on a humanitarian mission the aggressor is the RUC man and whoever ordered him to fire.

The point of signaling that they were going to intervene was to pressure the British to do something.

Which IMO it would have done because IF you read the thinking of the British at the time you will see they were under pressure as to how they were being perceived internationally. There was no way in hell they would have moved against a peaceful humanitarian act, they would have sought to deal with it diplomatically.

But the outcome would have very clearly established the fact that we were not going to 'stand idly by', the Irish people in the north crying out for protection could have seen that and the vacuum that the IRA and others filled would NOT have formed.

YES, there may have been casualties. But there were anyway - almost 4000 of them.

You understand the British/Unionist mind, what would they have done? What did they do when they found their people under threat from a force that was bigger than them in 1939 for instance? Did they **** the bed and cowardly do nothing? Did they worry about be 'laughed at'? No they didn't - they acted, as any self respecting country would. Please don't hold up a leader of the power swap as being self respecting, in one way or another they all doffed the hat...see Jack's phone call with Heath for all the evidence of that you need.

Of course you 'fail' to see it because you wish to misrepresent and lie about it as an 'invasion'.

The army understood. From your own link:

Yes it may have cost us, yes it might have ended badly but so might all actions of the state. And it 'ended' disastrously anyway as we have all seen.

Doing nothing was not an option and tragically, we took that option.