Martin forms an instructive contrast with the man with whom he job-shared as Taoiseach and Táiniste, Varadkar. The latter is an unprincipled chancer, and, as such, can see when something is obvious and then get behind it just in time, as he has recently done on Reunification; witness also his sudden interest a few years ago in ensuring women’s safety, or in being gay. He clearly relishes being slightly to the Republican side of the erstwhile Republican Party, and there was and is a sense that he hopes to be involved in Reunification, the better to glorify himself for History, particularly since he has decades more to live and no job or obvious skills.

This man has latterly been hanging around Harvard—proof of his fatuity—whose website describes him using the following extraordinary passage:

A strong supporter of Irish unification, he allocated over a €1billion to North-South projects under the Shared Island Fund and helped to get the power-sharing institutions of the Good Friday Agreement operating again.

Here the exact pointless activities that Martin uses to undo Republicanism have been recast as evidence of Varadkar’s own Republicanism. Then again the passage is full of lies, including about Ireland’s apparent success in reaching emissions targets, though it is oddly coy (and correct) when it states that “The Governments he participated in lifted Ireland’s ban on abortion and improved LGBT rights including the introduction of marriage equality and a gender recognition law”—it seems even he is too shameless to overstate his role in those campaigns.

Varadkar is politician-young, if not actual young: if Fianna Fáil can ever remove the dead weight of Martin from the leadership, it is possible that we will witness a similar phenomenon in that wing of the Partionist Party: someone who does nothing to prepare for Reunification while in office, but pimps themselves as a Republican afterwards. Of course Martin likes to boast that he was once a Brits Out type of guy until…until he was taught the word Reconciliation? Until he accepted Reconciliation payments from MI6? It is part of the Partionist worldview that of course as an irresponsible student they had once been in favour of the pipe dream of Unity, until they realised that only Settler dreams are allowed to come true, that the reactionary Utopia of “Northern Ireland” can be forced into being, but not a Free and United Ireland.

HOWEVER now that we are moving towards the future they dread, it is amazing to the Partionists that today’s young and young-ish people, who can see that the elite are lying about everything else, are not fooled by the claims that Reunification will be a catastrophe. And it is telling that a Neoliberal Regime—technocrats without any actual technical expertise—will attempt to make Reunification seem fiscally irresponsible, as if those who fought during the Revolutionary period did so to have a State of balanced budgets and low borrowing rates: no, they believed that Freedom was worth any price, but since they had the audacity to use guns against the famously peaceable English Army, they are already discredited in the eyes of those running the State that the Revolutionaries themselves won and left to us.