Ireland
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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…
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The attempted rejection of Comparison when it comes to Northern Ireland—that is, the rejection of history, of naming the Occupation Administration as a settler colonial project, an ongoing act of violence—has as a quite natural corollary the need to encourage the promotion of a new species of vocabulary, the specimens of which remind the observer…
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We witnessed in 2016 a commemoration of the Easter Rising and the Proclamation of the Republic; other terms were used, certain old wars being continued into the Present with words in place of arms. An extraordinary poster in a prominent site in Dublin commemorated four people for the occasion, Henry Grattan, Daniel O’Connell, Charles Stewart…
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We can expect, as the polling for His Majesty’s Glorious Union carries on sinking to a level beyond which even a few Irish Times readers might notice that the word majority can no longer be comfortably applied, that Partitionists will develop an interest in alternative means of gauging the strength of the Eternal Union. If…
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Writing about the census conducted in the Occupied Territories in 2021 presents the familiar problem of distinguishing between a religious label as it refers to religious practice, compared to its use as a stand-in for ethnic identity. The census collected two slightly different sets of figures, asking questions about religion, and about religion of upbringing;…
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With this, your correspondent introduces a new category: Ancient Grudge, whereby he complains about something from the past that has pissed him off enough that he has had to write about it to get it out of his system. Macdara has long been fascinated by the functioning of groups, and in particular the tendency of…
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The comedy of choice for the Partitionist elite is a niche publication known as the Irish Times. This outlet has courageously been describing ever smaller numbers as a majority when it comes to the issue of the Occupation. We should not expect it to be deterred by its own recent daring in describing the 50%…
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It is well known that one particular area in which Irish people were far outside international norms—the provision of standard reproductive healthcare—was partially dealt with by means of a landslide referendum result that heroically gifted Irish women only a restricted legal abortion regime, in place of the obvious cruelty of the previous extremely restricted regime.…
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RTÉ reports that the English government wants to revive the imperial system of measurements—which, Macdara has noticed, certain educated English people, possibly from a clever unconscious desire to deny the imperial legacy upon which they have suckled, refer to as the empirical system, as ingenuously as they refer to the English rather than the Latin…
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Ulster was the site of the greatest resistance to colonialism. For this, it was subject to the greatest usurpation: extensive settler colonialism. There is no secret here. The heirs to this occupation boast of it, dream of it, live it. It is the condition of their being. They hate the natives with the familiar venom of settler colonists anywhere who…