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 are forced to see daily that the natives still exist; that they thrive; that they, in fact, still breed extensively, surely with the sole purpose of promoting through the democratic fiction their claim as full subjects of humanity, and who may therefore vote for the return of land that the settler has tended with his (of course, his) sensible Plough for generations. For the settler, the native’s existence is nothing less than proof that the colonised will do to us in the end what we have done to them. It is not possible to reason with this kind of Guilt, which is something more than Guilt.

What do we have in Ireland? Two separate peoples always just there; an ancient grudge; two nations, both alike in history? No. What we have is settler colonialism, in the modern period. The English authorities, hands unclean, planted people in Ireland to rid the land of natives, to install a population to operate as its proxies. The nationalists for English colonisation in Ireland—the Unionists—are carrying out a destiny fixed for them generations ago, with all the confusion and resentment that you would expect of the lost, the banished, particularly since they do not and cannot themselves have an English identity, and are therefore missing a link that later white settlers elsewhere in the world have more easily been able to maintain.

Always compare. Do we think it is a bad thing to see white people in possession of land in a colony, or former colony, peopled by Black or Brown people? Whites in possession of resources, businesses, the military, the civil service and administration? Don’t you feel a certain disgust when you read the word Rhodesia? When you hear of the East India Company? We know it was wrong when European powers planted their people in lands that they wished to control. This is what we have in the north-east of our country. The linguistic ground shifted, and the natives in this case came to be understood as white, obscuring the Clarity of the colonial situation.

Settler colonialism. The phrase exists, see what happens when you use it.