Their unfinished, unfinishable status renders them stupid, lazy, fearful. The best recent example the present writer has come across was a settler whining that the tricolour of the Republic has green and orange on it (representing Catholics and Protestants), but that these colours are separate. Now, as everyone in the country knows, they are separated by white, representing peace between the two communities (this is the obligatory phraseology). But this settler would have it be believed that only an ugly mixture of green and orange, approximating some kind of brown, would represent togetherness on our flag, not that anyone would know what is being represented, faced with a brown flag. 

This is what we deal with when it comes to settlers. A knowing ignorance, a flaunted hostility to what is not only sensible, but can actually be perceived by the senses. Any fact, any occurrence, can be co-opted in favour of their Campaign. Nothing is too trivial. There can never be Reunification, a colonist argues, because there are charity shops in the north-east that are different to the charity shops in the twenty-six county state; Sinn Féin should run less candidates, another argues: their insistence on maximising their seats shows that they are not serious about outreach to colonists.

These are not serious arguments. The settler does not engage in serious argument because the settler has force. For anything that they say you must mentally add plus violence. The charity shops in Occupied Ireland are different plus violence so there can never be Reunification. Sinn Féin should know their place plus violence so nothing can ever change. They make themselves understood through violence, so you must be sure to hear it in what they say. Whatever the content of a sentence, its context is threat. Very often the content also will be threat. But you must pretend that this is not the case; their unknowingness must become a general metastasis of unthinking, always unacknowledged: even to refer to two communities instead of the much clearer Natives and Colonists is already to have given ground to them, given land to them.