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 the number of Irish may then seem too high, too divisive to point out, we can expect other proxies: the number of people living under the Occupation with parents born in the twenty-six counties (perhaps under 1%), or the number of people who have visited all twenty-six counties (presumably negligible); numbers like these surely call into question the commitment of such an Alien people to the project of Irishness! 

Macdara hereby calls for further investigation: how many of those living in any of the thirty-one counties that are not Roscommon have friends in that county? How many in these thirty-one counties have spent their summer holidays there? We need to know if Roscommon is truly Ireland or if we have a crowd of strangers, not to say traitors, amongst us, hidden in the middle of our country…To be clear: the use of such means of assessing whether people really belong in Ireland is absurd, cruel, meaningless; those of us in the north-east of our country are already within our country, and therefore are a part of it.

It is wonderful to be correct, but much less so when there is no way to prove it. The above was written before the Irish Times published its penetrating research, telling the world what we all wished to know about the travel habits of those Irish people living in the twenty-six counties. Yes, it found, these people do not habitually holiday in the north-east of the country. I am told that they found that this is true of as high a figure as 90% of people. Well surely, in that case, the English possessions in Ireland are safe forever! The colonists have held the land for so long now, it would be unfair to ask for it back at this stage. And making proactive political moves to take it back? That would be sheer terrorism: the people of Milton Keynes, unable to sleep; the people of Scunthorpe, too afraid to go to the betting shop; whole dart clubs in Ipswich that have to meet online. But let us follow the thought through: the Irish Times must surely now conduct research into how many English people visit Occupied Ireland each year. Or even, how many have ever been. Or even how many can say very basic things about the Colony, such as whether it is in the UK, or what its capital is; and perhaps, if they can answer both of these devious questions, they could be challenged to say one other thing about Northern Ireland. Then we will see what those compatriots of the Unionists know about their generations-long Occupation and about those agents of Occupation still present on the ground.