Is it true Irish counties were decided by the British as administrative divisions?

Deleted User wrote: »

Patww79 wrote: »

People in Northern Ireland can't get their heads around not using Free State. A mixture of a poor education system and badness.

Speaking of a 'poor education system' and 'badness', as long as one person in the Free State - namely, yourself - persists in bizarrely claiming the Irish still living under the remnant of British colonial rule that is Northern Ireland are not Irish, you're in absolutely no position to be giving out to them for calling you a Free Stater. That ridiculous excuse for logic implies that all my definitely Irish grandparents who were born in this 26-county state when it, too, was under British rule, were not Irish. Indeed, it implies that the Irish people never existed before this state came into existence on 6 December 1922.  

There's only one Ireland, no matter how many states the British might create out of this country. Country versus state. A simple distinction. That Ireland is synonymous with the Irish Republic, which remains unfulfilled for the moment and which explains why the current state is described only as the Republic of Ireland (this simple yet important nuance clearly evades some of our less refined minds).

Make no mistake but that is very much going to change in the foreseeable future. The current two states are only a temporary little arrangement - just as they were designed to be when they were invented by the British state on 23 December 1920 - a stepping stone to Irish political freedom. That's the easy part. Freeing the mind, Irish intellectual and cultural freedom from English ways and thinking, is another thing altogether.

Deleted User wrote: »

Taytoland wrote: »

Do you want a 32 county socialist Irish Republic? One in the image of James Connolly? If so, be honest with the Irish people on this forum and tell them that is the vision you have. James Connolly said himself replacing one flag for another while the English banking institutions rule over you won't change anything. 

Do you want to see the destruction of the capitalist system in Ireland? The destruction of free trade, the introduction of collectivization, public ownership of means of production, the destruction of private property?

For the moment, let's just focus on ending British rule and reunifying Ireland. The democratic wishes of the people acting free from foreign rule will work the details of the new state out. It's called democracy. By the way, you may have missed it but this state (and your own British state) is far more 'socialist' now than it was under British rule. In terms of improving the welfare, education and housing of the slum-dwelling abject poor of Dublin in 1913, much of what Connolly wanted has become a reality thanks to the welfare state - something which was introduced by conservative politicians largely out of a fear of the growth of communism (not out of a newfound niceness by the powerful). Those enormous social advances which improved the lives of most Irish people are also under threat now from a huge shift to the right and growing inequality in the western world. Like many others who are aware of our very recent past I'm solidly against that usurpation of the socially progressive and democratic capitalist state by a bunch of rabble-rising neocons and populists and their historically ignorant followers.