Blueshirt Senator’s partitionist rant

The most apt description of how the British partitioned Ireland can be found in a classic book written by the late Spike Milligan. Puckoon tells the story of what happened in a small village in Ireland when English civil servants, slightly in their cups, found that they could not guarantee an inbuilt unionist majority by drawing a straight line on the map. The result of this inebriated muddle was Puckoon, whose residents woke up the next morning to find the border running down the middle of the village street and through the cemetery. The dear departed were dug up to be re-interred on either side of the invisible line, according to their political and religious persuasions. It was thought at the time that Milligan had modelled Puckoon on the real-life village of Pettigo in Fermanagh. Indeed, he could have used any small village in Ireland, such was the economic and political disaster of partition for the people of this island.
The ravings of the Fine Gael Senator for Donegal, Joe McHugh, shows how partition has serviced and benefited the political establishment, North and South, who have embraced and done well out of our divided island.
McHugh has claimed that Derry people are “ruining Donegal” because they are buying homes in the villages a few miles down the road. Partition is not the problem. It’s us – the people who, by accident of birth, were born into the Six County entity and who cannot afford any longer to live in this privatised and high-tax economy which the British claim is theirs.
Mind you, it’s not so long ago that the shoe was on the other foot and the exodus that he talks about was from Donegal to Derry and beyond. Indeed, partition was an economic disaster for both counties, with Derry cut off from its natural hinterland in Donegal, and the people of Donegal living neither North nor South.
The Senator’s rant is not really about people from Derry buying houses in Donegal – a situation which, he claims, is “leading to the degrading of local communities”. Such language only reflects the inherent Blueshirt mentality of Fine Gael.
This is really about keeping Ireland partitioned by a class of nationalists who are quite comfortable living with and in a divided Ireland. These are the politicians who long ago abandoned the Proclamation, which charges them with cherishing all the children of the nation equally, just as they abandoned the nationalist people of the North.
That Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael politicians are reduced to canvassing for the SDLP is an indication not only of their partitionist mentality but of their fear that an exodus from the North may challenge the existing power in the South and change the political landscape of Ireland forever.
Sinn Féin will not settle for half a loaf any more than we will allow ourselves to be corralled within an invisible line on a map, drawn to facilitate Britain’s interests in Ireland. Our roadmap and our political journey are to a new Ireland and our train has already left the station.