The logic of the Occupied Territories, which is to say, the logic of Partitionism as it operates in the colonial entity, can be summarised as sure aren’t both sides as bad as each other, with the additional observation that in between these apparent twin extremes we find a growing—always growing—centre ground.

This petty exercise requires the promotion of certain settler supremacists to the Sensible Middle. Just as the forced-birth extremists of the SDLP are taken as the centrists on the native side, so the outright promoters of violence and hatred that make up the UUP are taken to be the settler equivalent. Meanwhile, the Alliance Party, a group of people with no policies whatsoever, who believe in fact that this is their great virtue, and who predictably evince a terrifying naivety not only about obvious aspects of the Occupation, but also about Politics as such, and the World at large, are the chief beneficiaries of the lazy both-siderism that obtains in respectable circles. 

Let us note that the major party that advocates for the equality of all citizens in a unified Republic, Sinn Féin, must be dismissed a priori as extremists because they fought an anticolonial campaign against the measurably greater violence of the Empire; as the present writer has persuasively argued, those who would condemn anticolonial violence must first calculate the much greater amount of time required to condemn colonial violence, and get going on that.

What Macdara wishes to draw attention to however is the inclusion in this marshy middle ground of the witless local branch of the Green Party, a subgroup of the already very stupid Green Party of Ireland. This crowd of earnest non-entities are given more than adequate attention by the media to merit being elected, if only the population would actually elect them. 

The last leader of this cute band explained that the Greens want to go beyond labels like socialism and capitalism, and by extension any anchors to what we might casually call real life: vote Green please…because it is Important to be Nice? Unfortunately, she said, the Occupied Territories remain overwhelmingly white (albeit, of course, two different flavours of white). She says this as if immigration would be a straightforward solution to the problems of the Occupation! Here we find not that she is making an argument in favour of the obvious benefits of immigration—Macdara does not, surely, need to assure the reader that he is whole-heartedly in favour of migration—she is instead ritualistically expressing shame that her bizarre land fails to meet the correct form of advanced capitalism, which is assumed to be multiculturalism, divorced—as it must be to perform its function—from any consideration of the reasons why people are driven to leave their homes to come and live in a foreign country; divorced also from any consideration of the effect of emigration on the countries these men and women have left behind. For people of this lady’s frame of mind, it is interesting and sophisticated just to see non-white people; to sit or stand next to them is even better; to exchange a few words with them would be heaven, making them feel that the Occupied Territories are almost like New York these days. This is clear evidence of the Shame of those in the post-colonial State: success is measured only by how closely one’s society matches the appearance of the Imperial capital. The north-east of Ireland simply must acquire Black and Brown people in order to know that it has made a success of itself! Let us admit however that it is hard enough for an immigrant to establish herself in any place at all, let alone a place that does not Exist.