Northern Ireland 2125?

You did not even begin to address my question. It was quite simple, i.e. why do you find it strange that a unionist living in the UK for over 60 years does not refer to themselves as Irish (as well as British), but you do not find it strange that a nationalist living in the UK (Northern Ireland) does not regard themselves as British (as well as Irish). 

Being prejudiced is nothing to be ashamed of.  We all have prejudice.  The challenge is recognising it when it’s pointed out to us I’m trying to reduce it.

this is a better colour to reflect our shirt.
also I would prefer it to say, ‘The United Island of Eire and Northern Ireland’, but as always, being reasonable, I thought I could live with united ireland

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francie you are one of the keyboard warriors doing Sinn Féin’s work for them. Here is a great piece (from this week, I believe), if you are struggling to understand:

If you missed Eilis O'Hanlon's "Sunday Independent" article critiquing IRA leader Gerry Adams' book about her sister, Siobhan O'Hanlon (then the sole survivor of the IRA terrorist Gibraltar bomb gang), here is the text of her article below the photo:

ADAMS REWRITES MY SISTER'S STORY TO WHITEWASH THE IRA'S BRUTAL PAST

If republicans believe their cause is just, why paint over the reality of what it involved, as they do with my late sibling?

The Sinn Féin book shop is not the sort of place where 1 can normally be found lurking, but I wanted a copy of Gerry Adams's new book, Siobhán O'Hanlon: A Sound Woman, which gathers memories of the late IRA volunteer and Sinn Féin activist who died of breast cancer in 2006 at the age of 44.

Siobhán was my sister. I was naturally curious what the book had to say. The book offers an affectionate portrait of a woman who was hugely admired and liked by her republican comrades. She was part of the Sinn Féin team that negotiated the Belfast Agreement. A framed picture of her standing outside Downing Street used to hang in my late mother's house.
Siobhán and I eventually ended up disagreeing about most things politically, and my memories of her will inevitably differ from those of the people close to her who shared her thinking. That's fine. "Recollections may vary," as the famous phrase has it. I am always slightly baffled by people who find the fact that Siobhán and I did not see eye to eye when it came to the IRA in any way remarkable.
Families having political differences? Imagine that. In the divisive cauldron of the Troubles, as during the Civil War, it happened routinely. Just because our family was well known in Belfast (our maternal uncle was IRA Chief of Staff Joe Cahill) does not make it more noteworthy. It wasn't nothing, but it wasn't everything either. These things happen.
What struck me was how the book describes some aspects of Siobhan's life that I knew very well, because I was there. I lived through them, too. The very first page acknowledges that she was an IRA volunteer, but when it comes to describing her activities it becomes oddly coy.
It says: "In 1982 she was arrested and charged on the word of a paid perjurer and im- prisoned in Armagh Women's Prison." That is certainly one way to put it. Another would be to state that Siobhán was arrested in a two-car convoy carrying a bomb. The man in the vehicle behind the car carrying the bomb did implicate her. I shall take Adams's word that the man was paid. He may even have perjured himself on some matters. I wouldn't know.
What I do know is that he was not of the IRA team that day. She was. It lying when he said Siobhán was part was one of many operations in which she took part at the time. I remember it well. She was never at home. We all knew what she was doing.
I find this refusal to give a thing its real name perplexing. I do not believe that anyone should have been carting bombs around Belfast in 1982. There were other, peaceful, ways to protest against British rule. Those who chose a different path can have had no complaint if they were arrested and jailed.
Republicans do not agree with this analysis. They believe that "armed struggle", to use their favourite euphemism, was not only a legitimate response to the "situation" (another euphemism), but was inevitable and a noble cause. That being the case, why be so coy about what the IRA did?
If you're not ashamed of it, why not just say she was transporting a bomb instead of tiptoeing around it like a Victorian lady novelist too delicate to describe someone's bare ankles?
Siobhán was released on bail for that offence just before Christmas 1982, and duly picked up where she left off. Just over six months later, she was back in prison again as "one of a group of women who were arrested at a house" and, the book says, "charged with possession of explosives".
The reason that Siobhán was charged with possession of explosives is because she was in possession of explosives. The house was what was commonly known as a "bomb factory".
Again, one can disagree as to the validity of such actions, but let's not beat about the bush. The bombs were being assembled to kill people - members of the security services - republicans would say, but if there is one thing that history has taught us it is that bombs are by their nature indiscriminate. They blow up anyone in the vicinity, not just those designated as legitimate targets. If such acts were justified by the circumstances of the time, then own it. Why present it in such passive, detached terms?
Siobhán was sentenced to seven years for that offence, of which she did three and a half behind bars.
On release, she recommenced her IRA career, and is said in this book to have been "shocked" by events in Gibraltar in 1987, when three unarmed volunteers on active duty were shot dead by the SAS while heading to the border after a scouting mission.
The book leaves out one salient detail, which is that Siobhán was the fourth member of the Gibraltar cell.
She was named as such a year later by The Sunday Times, under the headline, 'Revealed: IRA girl who survived Gibraltar”. It was a sloppy piece of journalism in many ways. Numerous details were dangerously wrong. The description given of Siobhán bore no resemblance to her. The closest match to it was me and another sister, and I was the only one living in the family home at the time. If anyone had decided to come to the door with evil intent, they would probably have assumed that I was her. I was genuinely terrified for my life.
Those errors aside, the report was right in its central detail, which is that Siobhán was part of the IRA operation to bomb Gibraltar. That is on public record. Surveillance photos have been published showing her on reconnaissance in the British-run enclave.
So, the same question was plotting to plant a bomb in the packed tourist streets of Gibraltar for the changing of the guard a defensible act? I would argue, strongly, that it was not. Those who contributed to this new book about Siobhán presumably disagree. That is for them to defend. But if they really don't believe there is any shame in risking so many lives, why not say what she was doing there without equivocation or apology?
Siobhán herself was certainly proud of her time in the IRA. It defined her. In a way, it almost feels disrespectful to skirt around the details of her activities while purporting to offer a true portrait of her for posterity.
Then again, the book is written by Gerry Adams (together with Sinn Féin press officer Richard McAuley). Reticence has ever been his watchword when it comes to facing up to the atrocities that the IRA committed during the darkest years.
This evasiveness is baked into the culture of the republican movement.
During one of the fruitless phone calls that we occasionally had after I started writing critically about republicanism, Siobhán insisted that she was simply trying to make Northern Ireland (not that she would have called it that) a "better place". My reply was that this was a bit rich when it was people like her and her comrades who had only helped to make it worse.
I can't recall her response to that, but it was unlikely to have been congenial. We were both of a feisty nature, not inclined to back down in the face of confrontation. I wasn't asking her to change her mind. I simply expected her to respect mine.
After Gibraltar, Siobhán was too well known to be a safe bet for the organisation. She would have presented a risk to other IRA members sent on any operation with her. She switched instead to working in Sinn Féin, where she seems to have tirelessly organised the heck out of anything that needed organising, before cancer sadly struck.
Those who knew Siobhán best during those years can write and talk about her in any way they choose. We must all tell stories in our own way.
What makes this book about her politically problematic is that it comes as part of a relentless ideological drive to minimise what the Provos did during those decades of conflict.
Putting the face of IRA terrorist Brendan 'Bik' McFarlane on a giant screen on the final day of Féile an Phobail last weekend was another example. Do those behind these stagings really think we don't know what they're doing? They are weaponising false memories.
Adams's book about Siobhán is typical of that republican mindset, which wallows in victimhood, wildly sentimentalising the past, while simultaneously celebrating but also downplaying the Provo campaign.
The former Sinn Féin president writes with almost toxic nostalgia of being part of a "community under military occupation", and its "culture of resistance against... oppression", as if the Belfast Agreement never happened. That agreement explicitly binds its signatories to respect the legitimacy of the decision of a majority in the North to remain part of the United Kingdom if that is their choice.
To still throw around slogans such as "occupation" and "resistance" 27 years on, ignoring all historical and demographic complexities, is childish stuff. These people's thinking hasn't progressed or acquired any levels of nuance or moral depth in decades.
Adams writes in this book about Catholic families being put out of their homes by loyalists during those years. My own was among them. It was an awful time. No one who went through it will ever forget what it was like. Innocent people were being attacked and killed, as Adams says.
What the book conveniently leaves out is that the same thing was also happening to people on the other side of the divide, and the IRA played a shameful role in it, terrorising the Protestant/unionist community and wrecking any hope of reconciliation.
This book about my sister is just another front in an ongoing attempt to whitewash the past to make it seem as if violence was both inevitable and noble.
We all grew up in the same conditions, but it should never be forgotten that the overwhelming majority of people in the North never killed or hurt a single other person. These are the people who are being erased in favour of a cartoonish fake history,
Adams is right about one thing. Siobhán's life was far too short.
So, too, were those of legions of innocent victims, sent to their graves by a republican movement that had the shameful conceit to choose who lived or died.
The IRA never had that right. It must not be given it retrospectively.