The Political Thread

[Steve Green]

I guess the feeling is he can do less damage as Mayor than as leader of the Conservative party...

[JOE SOAP]

Tsk, tsk, Joe, Dev will be turning in his grave if he heard that

Good, considering he handed the running of the country over to the Catholic church and destroyed the civil service.

[TordelBack]

Tsk, tsk, Joe, Dev will be turning in his grave if he heard that

Good, considering he handed the running of the country over to the Catholic church and destroyed the civil service.

The cult of DeValera, Champion of the Republic, annoys me intensely, despite my emerging from school fully indoctrinated in it, and his being pally with my granddad.  Where this country might be now if that treacherous hypocrite hadn't kept us groveling in the shit for nearly 50 years - he's Ireland's Franco, with the magdelene asylums, laundries and industrial schools standing in for the Generalisimo's concentration camps.  Being played by Alan Rickman isn't punishment enough.

[JOE SOAP]

Making it compulsory to speak gaeilge -very few could- to enter the civil service was a disastrous policy that meant those without experience, but had the 'language', could only be given jobs. Mostly people from rural backgrounds/gaeilge strongholds, excluding everyone else. Also a method of getting rid of experienced Protestants with job knowledge from positions of administration.

[Beaky Smoochies]

I'm not championing Dev, Tordelback dude, don't get me wrong, both you and Joe are bang-on correct about the damage he did to Ireland - both north and south - the Free State Constitution was a decent document, in my opinion, which I would've enthusiastically supported, it was Dev and the Fianna Fail wackos that tore it up and replaced it with a theocratic Constitution in 1937 that both put Ireland back decades, but also alienated most Irish Protestants, north and south, with it's adherence to the Mother Church, not to mention the illegal and highly provocative territorial claim to the north, which put Unionist heckles up, and virtually destroyed the relative good relations the two states had for the first decade of partition... and gave Paisley all the ammunition he ever needed to go on a rampage (and look where that ended)!

If you'll do me the courtesy of allowing a controversial statement, I personally think that if the U.K. government had offered the Irish Parliamentary Party what we are now referring to today as 'devo-max' (the Irish, minus the six counties, take care of every legislative matter via their own bicameral parliament, except foreign policy and defence, maintain a few MP's at Westminster to have representation in those two remaining areas, and remain in the Union but with national status) in 1914, and implemented it immediatly instead of waiting for the end of WW1, Eire could still be part of the Union today, would be much better off (IMHO), and we all could have been spared four decades of bloody mayhem, just a thought, but I'll just duck for cover now...

[TordelBack]

If you'll do me the courtesy of allowing a controversial statement, I personally think that if the U.K. government had offered the Irish Parliamentary Party what we are now referring to today as 'devo-max' (the Irish, minus the six counties, take care of everything except foreign policy and defence, and remain in the Union, but with national status) in 1914, and implemented it immediatly instead of waiting for the end of WW1, Eire could still be part of the Union today, would be much better off (IMHO), and we all could have been spared four decades of bloody mayhem, just a thought, but I'll just duck for cover now...

There's no question that if the Third Home Rule Bill had been enacted in 1914 things would have played out very differently, but I'm not sure permanent partition would have been part of it.  Sadly, I suspect assholes with guns and the cries of poets in the ears would still have done something stupid at some point down the road.

[JOE SOAP]

Churchill offered Dev a United Ireland if he promised to throw in his lot against Hitler and allow the British access to Irish ports, Dev refused because he didn't want to have Prods sitting in the Dublin Parliament. Religion and politics don't mix.

If you'll do me the courtesy of allowing a controversial statement, I personally think that if the U.K. government had offered the Irish Parliamentary Party what we are now referring to today as 'devo-max' (the Irish, minus the six counties, take care of every legislative matter via their own bicameral parliament, except foreign policy and defence, maintain a few MP's at Westminster to have representation in those two remaining areas, and remain in the Union but with national status) in 1914, and implemented it immediatly instead of waiting for the end of WW1, Eire could still be part of the Union today, would be much better off (IMHO), and we all could have been spared four decades of bloody mayhem, just a thought, but I'll just duck for cover now...

It would never have happened -regarding either side- after hundreds of years of oppression unfortunately.

[Beaky Smoochies]

Churchill offered Dev a United Ireland if he promised to throw in his lot against Hitler and allow the British access to Irish ports, Dev refused because he didn't want to have Prods sitting in the Dublin Parliament. Religion and politics don't mix.

I don't think it was because he hated Prods, Joe, Dev was against Eire leaving the Commonwealth, and didn't even turn up to the ceremony in Dublin to mark Eire becoming a republic in 1949, because he thought it would help placate Unionists if some nominal connection to the Crown was maintained.  As far as Churchill's offer of a united Ireland, Dev was a canny fox and knew Churchill had no way to implement it even if Eire joined the war effort, northern Unionists would have went ballistic and threatened all-out resistance with the guns they smuggled in back in 1912, and we'd be back to square one all over again... and besides, there was already Prods in both the Dail and the Senate, not to mention the first President of the Irish Republic, Douglas Hyde, being a Protestant himself!

[JOE SOAP]

I don't think it was because he hated Prods, ... and besides, there was already Prods in both the Dail and the Senate, not to mention the first President of the Irish Republic, Douglas Hyde, being a Protestant himself!

I never said he hated Prods but having a Dáil with a large Protestant representation from the North was not desirable for Dev's nor the Church's "Catholic Ireland".

[Beaky Smoochies]

I never said he hated Prods but having a Dáil with a large Protestant representation from the North was not desirable for Dev's nor the Church's "Catholic Ireland".

True, you never actually said that, apologies on my part for picking that up wrong , but if the north had thrown their lot in with the independent Irish state (and, speaking as a northern Protestant myself, sometimes I genuinely ponder whether we should have, with certain cast-iron political/economic/cultural guarantees codified in a written Constitution), they would have had no more TD's in Dail Eireann than MP's in Westminster, as we would still have retained the northern parliament (Collins and Griffith both readily agreed to that during the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations), it's the southern Unionists that were not represented proportionally there- the percentage of Protestants in the 26 counties after partition was 10%, meaning if there was, say, 150 in the Dail, then 15 should have been southern Unionists (there was only 4 out of 128 TD's), and if you add that to the likely number of northern Protestant TD's (had they thrown their lot in with the rest of Ireland), that would have constituted another, say, 12 (conservative estimate based on number of Unionist MP's at Westminster), that's 27 Protestant TD's out of a potential 166-member Dail (16 northern TD's in total; 12 Unionist and 4 Nationalist, based on population demographics at the time), and considering you also had Fine Gael (or their forerunners that I can't spell), Sinn Fein, Labour, and independents, I'm not sure if they wouuld have made THAT big a difference, considering coalition governments in Eire didn't really become a permanent fixture until 1989 onwards, but as ever, I could be wrong, you live there Joe, so I'll defer to you as always...

[JOE SOAP]

My point is there would've been a large voting block of Nothern Protestants now included in the body politic of the country.

[ICONIC_TM]

Old Boy Down The Pub Told Me, Never Talk About Football, Politics Or Religion.

[JOE SOAP]

130 pages in, it's called 'the Political Thread'.

[ICONIC_TM]

And Things Are Still The Same?   

[TordelBack]

That's politics for ya.