- Crisis and Decline: The Fate of the Southern Unionists.
- After partition, Irish republicanism exacted a brutal revenge on the old tribal enemy
"Writing in 1965, A J P Taylor described the Irish settlement embodied in the 1920 Government of Ireland Act and the Anglo-Irish Treaty of the following year as "a great achievement". Ireland might have ruined Lloyd George as it had ruined Peel and Gladstone before him, Taylor wrote, but "at least he was ruined by success, they by failure" - a verdict that was to seem painfully complacent within a few years of its publication...
"
- The
Irish Language
- An essay on language policy
"That all our pupils should come to appreciate and love our
national culture and heritage and the vital part the Irish language plays in
this." This is bogus. Ireland's culture is squarely in the
English-speaking world and Gaelic is a foreign language to 95% of the Irish.
Meanwhile, on the whole, the Republic of Ireland has the weakest education
standards of the OECD English-speaking countries and among the weakest in the
European Union. This is true for both the younger generations and the older.
It has been suggested that
trying to teach Gaelic in primary school is a contributing factor to this, not
just in terms of all the time that is wasted on it...."
- Rejoining the Commonwealth
- The Republic should consider rejoining the Commonwealth both for itself and unionist confidence-building
"
The Commonwealth today is not, as many Irish people imagine it to be, the British Empire in drag; it is not the resurrected cadaver of empire. It is over half a century since Ireland left the Commonwealth. It's time for the Irish to take another look...."
- Quiet Minority?
- A reflection on Irish society and the British minority
"David Trimble touched on a few raw nerves with his assertion that the Irish Republic (in which I was born and where I live) is a "mono-ethnic, mono-cultural, sectarian state". But he did succeed in lighting the touch paper for quite an unprecedented debate – from which a lot can be learnt about life in the Republic today. It may seem odd to some that the comments of a unionist leader could have generated such debate among a Southern audience long hardened to the rhetoric of people like Paisley."
- Lauching the Reform Movement
- How it was viewed in the Irish media
"Article to appear shortly"
- Violence, intimidation and terror in Cork 1919-1921
- An essay on the unionist community in County Cork
"In 1919 the Unionist community in County Cork was prosperous, numerous and committed in varying degrees to the Unionist cause. They had their own newspaper, held parades and maintained a complex social system. Yet by 1923 their community lay decimated, torn asunder by a campaign of murder and intimidation and forced into a supposedly "Free State" which did little to protect them. What brought about such cataclysmic changes? How was the campaign of murder conducted and for what reasons? Did Cork Unionism maintain it's identity during those violent years - and can this still be seen today?"
- Treat of the experience of Unionists in County Donegal during the period 1919-22
- Treat of the experience of Unionists in County Donegal during the period 1919-22
"Unionism in County Donegal has a long and proud tradition and heritage, which dates back to the very foundations of the Unionist cause on this island. Yet it was during the period 1919-22 that the Unionist people of County Donegal were put to their utmost test. Ultimately, it is arguable that they lost – Ulster was partitioned and the pro-union community decimated. But in the final analysis it cannot be denied that Unionism in the county survived the period, and continued in one form or another up until the present day..."
- The Other Face of Orangeism
- The following is an interview with a former member of the Orange Order
"As a member of the unionist community and a person who has, in the past, marched with the Orange Order, it strikes me that there is a considerable disparity between the 'image' of Orangeism portrayed by the world media and its reality. TV pictures of huge crowds venting their anger..."
- Irish Soldiers in India
- "C. J. O'Donnell's claim in 1913 that "India was the great prize of a Gaelic-speaking army recruited by the East India Company exclusively in Ireland under Irish generals" was, no doubt, grossly exaggerated: but it did contain a modicum of fact, for Irish soldiers and Irish generals had made (and continued to make) a disproportionate contrbution to the 'steel frame' around which the Raj was built..."
- Why did Ireland leave the Commonwealth?
- An investigation by the Reform Movement
"The Reform Movement has done some research on the why the Coalition government decided to take Ireland out of the British Commonwealth in 1948. This research was carried out following a casual remark made by the ex-Irish Ambassador to the USA, Mr Noel Dorr, who said to some Reform members that Ireland did not leave the British Commonwealth, but was asked to leave by the British government. This extraordinary interpretation is not supported by the facts..."
- Why are there 700,000 British Passports in the Republic of Ireland?
- An article by Bruce Arnold
"I have been puzzling, over the past week, about a statistic which I find hard to believe, even harder to explain. It is this: Within the Republic of Ireland there are between 500,000 and 600,000 men and women who hold British passports
The statistic derives from the British Embassy, and is construed from the fact that each year, on average, 70,000 passports are either renewed, changed, or issued, to people resident in the Republic of Ireland..."
- War, Neutrality and Irish Identities, 1939-1945
- An interesting article associated with the Challenge of the “Irish Volunteers” of World War II
"During the war perhaps some 70,000 citizens of neutral Ireland served in the British armed forces, together with 50,000 or so from Northern Ireland. Virtually all of these recruits were volunteers, who mostly joined up after September 1939. It is important to note, too, that unlike the First World War, volunteering during the Second World War was not a process of collective mobilisation. In southern Ireland, at least, decisions to serve were primarily individual and discrete..."
- The Scattering Ireland and the Empire, 1801—1921
- An essay on Ireland's ambiguous role in the British Empire
"Ireland’s peculiar status under the Union is central to explaining its ambiguous involvement in the British Empire. The formal Union of the kingdoms of Ireland and Great Britain masked a hybrid administration with manifest colonial elements, allowing variant interpretations of the character of Ireland’s dependency within the Empire. Was Ireland an integral part of the United Kingdom, a peripheral and backward sub-region, or a colony in all but name? These were the conflicting assumptions of unionists, devolutionists and separatists respectively..."
- A Roof for Our Common Home
- An essay on Ireland's relationship with the UK
"The attempt by Garret Fitzgerald and Paul Gillespie to analyse the relationship between the Irish and the British reveals, in my view, much evidence of what a psychoanalyst could only call 'denial'. In the first instance, we are told that the Irish Republic's membership of the EU has "completed the project of Irish independence" and led to the dissolution of the irredentist claim on the territory of Northern Ireland. This assertion ignores entirely the ruling of the Irish Supreme Court in 1990 which decided that Articles Two and Three of the Irish Constitution were an 'imperative' to reintegrate the national territory..."
- Time to ring the changes on the Angelus bell so we are more inclusive of all Beliefs.
- RTE'S broadcasting of the Angelus has long been the subject of controversy.
"RTE claims that it keeps the broadcasting of the Angelus under continuing review, and the points made about it are used as part of that process. Two more distinct attitudes than those of Mary Kenny and Robin Bury would be hard to find.
Mary Kenny's defence of the Angelus, in an article in the Saturday Weekend magazine at the beginning of September, was based on folk traditions and the emotive portrait of peasants standing barefoot in the fields "when it was forbidden to toll a Catholic chapel bell...."
- Dublin Excludes Unionist Culture
- Society in the Republic is ignorant, intolerant, apathetic and narrowly nationalist in relation to the North, a report has found.
"...It adds that anti-British attitudes have helped "restrict the creation of trust-building with the unionist community" in Northern Ireland.
It says there has been "a fostering of selective cultural and historical amnesia", which led to the "airbrushing" out of history those "Irish people who fought on the British side in the World Wars, and a mistaken belief that only Catholics suffered in the 19th-century famines
..."
© Reform Movement 2003
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