United Ireland Poll - please vote

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.

ireland would absolutely have been able theoretically to engage in a humanitarian mission in northern ireland once they would have gone through the proper channels to do so, that is a fact.

now what is likely true is that they would not have had the man power required given the severe nature of the erupting of northern ireland all though certainly what man power we did have were very capable individuals in their own right.

exclusionary partitionists and their refusal to deal with the reality that their claims of exclusionary nationalism are a myth in ireland will never be able to come to terms with the fact that nobody has advocated for invasions of northern ireland, or anything that ultimately shows their beliefs to be incorrect.

and there was 1 way to stop partition, not sign the treaty.

By the way blanch, before you go wasting more pixels - I get why we did nothing. It was fear and lack of care. You can express that however you want but that essentially was what it was.

What state the world would be in had every country behaved similarly I shudder to think.

You said that a humanitarian mission would have brought violence to Catholics and nationalists...that is exactly why there was a need for a humanitarian mission.

And that onslaught happened anyway...you may have missed it.

I never said that this is anything but my own opinion. All a historian is doing when speculating is the same thing blnach.

By the way is is not a 'singular' view either. There are many many people who think the Irish government failed Irish people in the north, as well as elsewhere.

I think we should quote this bit again..

I must say I like that turn of phrase.... 'Ruinious irredentist impulses...' Ill use that in future... :)

So you dont believe in democracy then, because a majority in the Dail DID sign the treaty....

For those not up to speed on the history I suggest starting with RTE's coverage of 100 years since the Treaty. Good discussions were the options available and the options refused and taken are discussed.

I haven't excused anyone. All I have done is point out the ridiculous idea that we should have invaded the North in 1970. It would be completely hilarious if it wasn't put forward so seriously.

It doesn't matter what we recognised or didn't recognise.

China doesn't recognise Taiwan's independence.

Russia doesn't recognise Ukraine's borders.

Pakistan doesn't recognise India's borders.

So once again, exactly the same. Nonsense about the Constitution trumping anything the UN has to say. As for UK and US ignoring the UN, they are permanent members of the Security Council with a veto, we aren't.

We would have been crushed in 1970, ending up as a UN protectorate at best, with the economic success of a Lebanon.

The same excuses were used by the Germans at the time. It is ridiculous and facetious to make the argument that in comparing the excuses being used, I was making us the Nazis. A risible argument at the best of times, pathetic would be a better word.

I do not have a hate for all things nationalist. I am a GAA club member and county supporter. I am a follower of the national rugby and soccer teams. I celebrate our music, our culture and our sporting achievements. Where you are correct, and for which I make no apology, I hate the exclusionary aspects of the way that our nationality is expressed in certain ways.

We wouldn't have got the telegram out to the UN before the British would have crushed us. No amount of green-tinged fairytale history can change the facts that the UK had a veto at the UN, we would have encroached on a NATO border and the only ones who would have cheered us on to destruction were the USSR and China, both of them totalitarian regimes at the time.

Oh, just realised you were back in the earlier fantasy of rejecting partition in 1921. Now it seems that you are intent on rejecting the democratic will of the people as expressed in the Dail at the time. We voted for the Treaty, end of.

Rubbish and riddled with hat doffing awestruck subservience to the idea that the British were not under international and domestic pressure themselves.

A signaled humanitarian mission would have been met by diplomacy when we could have negotiated protections for Irish people and avoided the tragic and dangerous vacuum that formed.

Mark and your arguments about this been blown out of the water by the expert discussions taking place on the radio at the moment. There were options on the Treaty and in 1969.

A signalled humanitarian mission.... whatever that is.

You can call it the second coming of Jesus for all you want, it would have been met with force by the British.

There is no way in any shape or form that a UK Prime Minister would have sat by and let a foreign military incur into its territory.

We saw what the British did during the Falklands War, an island in the middle of nowhere, can you imagine them doing anything less when the UK itself is invaded in such a manner?

Francie, you are like a drunk prophet screaming 'the truth' at people but you are utterly delusional about this one. No one is buying what you are selling.

You signal to the appropriate people and to the world press (always hungry for a story) that you are sending in a humanitarian mission to protect people you are constitutionally mandated to protect. You are doing it under duress but feel it is your duty etc etc.

As several contributors to the debate on the treaty have said, there is no way the British (under international pressure themselves) would have responded with force instantly. The same applies (even more so) to 1969 when oppression could clearly be seen.

If you read Hansard and what the various leaders had to say, they were petrified about radicalising Southern Ireland and a wipeout of a southern Irish humanitarian taskforce would instantly achieve that as well as increasing international pressure on them.

Step away from the subservient awestruck ramblings a second mark and look at realpolitick.

Even the Falklands saw multiple rounds of diplomacy before aggression was used.

Aggression against a humanitarian mission the world could see was required could never be justified not even by the British.

Apples and oranges my friend.

Not only that, but our own parliament voted to accept the Treaty. Those calling for a war in 1921 are ignoring democracy again.

There was no world press in 1970, there wasn't a CNN or anything like that. Sending a few cable to Reuters would have been the height of it.

The appropriate people were the UN which was run as a club for the five great powers, so no hearing there. NATO was more powerful than the EEC, so little luck to be found there either. Spain was run by Franco, Italy a mess, Eastern Europe under the thumb of the USSR. Africa was in bits, where is this support you talk of going to come from? It didn't come when the British introduced internment and the Diplock Courts, or after Bloody Sunday, so I really don't get this deluded idea.

The reality is that if we had sent a 25,000 army up North on a humantarian mission in 1970, we would have been lucky if 250 came back. NATO would have annexed the country, they couldn't have had the possibility of a USSR sympathiser at the back door.

Apples and oranges. You are taking a quotation out of context.