Irish gives us a word, a tricky conjuring thing, to use for this difficult order of phenomenon: the thing that exists only in belief, in play, but for that reason can be said to exist, with all the consequences that follow. Let us use the word: geis. Taboo, prohibition, injunction, spell, vow, curse. It binds, it breaks; forces, forbids. Geasa happen in many an old story, being something more than signposts as to what will happen next; think rather of some cartoon in which a train is detoured by tracks newly laid. This is the logic of the geis: if you are under an imprecation never to refuse a stranger’s gift, then you must accept that you will be given some item that another geis forbids you to eat: in this way you will find a knot in your life that must end it.  

We were placed under a geis several generations ago, by a people who know no magic. A serpent leapt from some heavy book in Westminster; in the time it took news to travel, it slithered across the Sea of Man, and into Loch Cairlinn, squeezed first up An Rí, then flicked itself onto land, leaving there its tail while its head dipped into An Feabhal, ducked west to capture Doire and laid itself finally—greedy, tired—in Loch Feabhail. A 500 km snake with no force beyond that given to it by a colonial authority. A curse that we fall under in recognising it as such.

Macdara’s great fear is that we will not be the ones to banish this snake, this péist. If the English authorities—once again—interfere, and decide to end their injunction, then we will be left awake, dazed; we will not have removed the spell ourselves, and nothing we do thereafter can be for ourselves. The drive to agree that the Border is not where it is, is nowhere at all, must come from ourselves. We might hope that the party called Ourselves—Sinn Féin—can accomplish this, or at least lead the way in doing so. Unfortunately there is every reason to believe that this party will join the rightward drift of all parties in capitalo-democracy. Within the logic of the Republic as a Late Capitalist State, Sinn Féin must prove, in order to come to power, that nothing will happen should they enter Government: nothing whatsoever. A great act of oath-breaking cannot be countenanced; that, of course, would be too much something.

So holds the spell, though that is all it is.  

There are enough of us to break it.