you’ll have to forgive my no doubt clumsy attempt at subtlety, but whilst I plainly am hostile to republicans, I do try not to reduce people to their political positions. Republicans are human beings, not cartoon villains. It is their republicanism to which I am hostile, nothing more.

And whilst there were many ways in which republicanism should have been given a kicking—e.g., working hard, if one had influence on British state policy, to remove factors that could make republicanism an attractive ideology to anybody other than a small hard core of psychopaths and fascists—one of those ways inevitably had to be kicking republicanism’s vectors, i.e., republicans.

In doing so, however, it would have been important not to descend to their level; the final word in my post upthread @34 is not the least important in that post. Though I think it will be obvious that there is much I liked about Cruise O’Brien, there were also some things I disliked, and one that I dislike most intensely was his willingness to connive in having a few big old guards beat holy fuck out of IRA men. Never mind that IRA men might arguably, in some cosmic moral sense, deserve having holy fuck beaten out of them; CCOB (and the policemen in question) were acting under colour of state authority. In no state worth defending can that sort of thing be lawful; and agents of the law acting unlawfully is something I despise.

Anyway, all that is in the past now, isn’t it, and republicans (and their equally repugnant opposite numbers) no longer terrorise or murder, do they, except for members of their own community. So that’s all right then. Or at least, people in Northern Ireland have decided it’s an acceptable price to pay for something like peace. And fair play to them; but I still don’t think medals should be handed out for refraining from murder, and I will be glad if Sinn Féin’s electoral success remains limited to British elections.

I did notice the lack of a fada, but I have to say that the tone of the discussion between EWI and other posters had an amazingly strong whiff of inside baseball. I just wanted a translation for the bystanders like me so that we could follow the game.

I’m going to have to quibble with something you said, unfortunately. You didn’t say give “chuckianism” a kicking, you said giving the “chucks a kicking”, which does betray a certain hostility to the people who belong to the movement and not just the movement itself.

As for republicanism, it seems like Australia is the next great hope.

I always thought it was something about floors. I just thought they really loved interior decorating. I guess you need floors to stash the armalites underneath.

Seriously, though, Ms Tilton, your post was a thing of beauty.

the first one to say (loudly and repeatedly) “You can’t bomb one million Protestants into a United Ireland”

I recall Cruise O’Brien writing—was it in States of Ireland?—that he had said just that, during his days at Foreign Affairs working on the antipartition campaign, to some rural nationalist elder from the North; who, with unusual honesty, replied, “Who wants to bomb them into it?”

That is now a truism, but it was revolutionary in the 1970s. Four years after the 1966 celebrations of the 1916 Rising and after 50 years of glorifying violent Republicanism from soft armchairs, there was an unspoken expectation that the Provos might “win back the North” for the rest of us. O’ Brien was the first and most forceful of those who pointed out how disastrous this course would be. Even in the 1980s, I can remember Captain James Kelly (he of the Arms Crisis, and then just re-elected at that time to Fianna Fail’s National Executive) demanding the withdrawal of the Irish Gardai and Army from the border counties to “let the Provos at them”. Many agreed with this on the grounds of the expense to the Irish state of the security measures needed to prop up the British in the North. Other believed that Ireland would never “fulfil its national destiny” until we “took back” Northern Ireland.

The resemblance to Milosovic is obvious, thankfully none emerged. But O’Brien was one of the most important of those who made sure he never did, or never could. He showed the intellectual case for supporting the Provos was a crock of shit, and for that we are in his debt.

Are people aware that he claimed to have inspired the name of Orwell’s O’Brien from 1984? How true that is I have no idea…

Sorry about that; the strikethrough tag worked well enough in the preview.

the movement around the IRA and Sinn Féin use the slogan “tiocfaidh ár lá” (“our day will come”), which is pronounced roughly like “chuckie are law”. Hence “the chuckies” or “the chucks”. As to why that movement needed kickings back when Cruise O’Brien was in a position to kick, let’s go to the numbers.

As for what “Eire” gives away, it gives away two things, actually. The first thing it gives away is that the writer is unfamiliar with the terminology preferred by the Irish themselves, who would normally use the Irish-language name of the place only when speaking Irish, “Ireland” being deemed perfectly suitable for use by those Irish people able to speak the tongue of the Saxon oppressor. The second thing it gives away is that the writer doesn’t actually know the name of the place in Irish, which is not Eire but Éire. A small thing, that fada, but its absence weighs heavily.

When the Free State changed its name (in Irish) to just-plain Éire, lots of people on the island over to the right started using that name in English. In some, this was possibly contentious (and possibly that contentiouness is what EWI perceives in, and thinks given away by, what Dave wrote). In most, though, I think it reflects nothing more than confusion (and possibly even a friendly desire to use what one mistakenly believes the correct name). Confusion is understandable. The nomenclature of the various geographic and political bits of the British Isles IONA these islands those things from which the continent is sometimes cut off by fog can be complex.

I’m told, though, that linguists are all about description rather than prescription these days. Words are what people use them as. It might be strictly speaking wrong by current standards, but if enough British people used “Éire” (or even “Eire”) to refer to the bits of Ireland that are no longer in the UK, and kept doing so for a long enough time, well then, that would eventually become a correct name for Ireland; but it would be a name in English. I am happy, however, to join with EWI in encouraging Dave and all his countrymen to refer to the country as “Ireland” any time there is no reason to distinguish specifically between the Republic and Northern Ireland (or, as I should possibly call it as long as we are trying to be correct about these things, the Corrupt 6-County Orange Statelet), and to use “Éire” only when speaking Irish.

Slippage and change in meaning happen to lots of words, though, and haven’t spared “republican”. You write that I hate republicans (though it would be more accurate to say that I hate republicanism). It might surprise you, then, to learn that I think “republican” one of the noblest names in the history of Ireland, and in the history of political philosophy generally. And I gladly claim that name for myself, to the extent it still denotes what Butler described in, for example, Wolfe Tone and the Common Name of Irishman (sorry, doesn’t seem to be online, but you can find it in at least one easily available anthology).

Sadly, the meaning of that lovely old word has changed (not, to be sure, in an Irish context alone) such that it now usually refers to people with whom I would not willingly associate. In the Irish context, as I am sure you know, most people now use the word to refer to the movement that so resoundingly beat all other players to the top of that league table I linked to in the first paragraph above. And that sort of movement does need a kicking, whenever a kicking can be administered to it lawfully.

What’s a “chuck”, and why do they need kicking? I know Mrs Tilton hates republicans with a deep and abiding passion, so I assume a chuck would be a republican, but it would be nice to get the confirmation.

Why is “Eire” a giveaway?

I see that you lack familiarity with the Irish educational system (“Eire” is a giveaway, which more charitable souls here may have the patience to explain to you). The outcome of this policy is that little or no history is taught (in comparison to the situation which obtained before), so as not to inflame any possible nationalist opinion.

Umm, not so much

“Eire” is a giveaway, which more charitable souls here may have the patience to explain to you

That burden falls properly on you, I think.

the view that Irish history is a “shopiing list of grievances”…

… is bollocks, of course. The view that Irish historiography at certain periods has been just that, by contrast, is not.

I see that you lack familiarity with the Irish educational system (“Eire” is a giveaway, which more charitable souls here may have the patience to explain to you). The outcome of this policy is that little or no history is taught (in comparison to the situation which obtained before), so as not to inflame any possible nationalist opinion. The wrongness of this policy should need no pointing out on a forum filled with educators.

I’m very sorry to hear that you subscribe to the view that Irish history is a “shopiing list of grievances”. I suggest that you perhaps to reflect on why it is that, outside of the UK educational system, Ireland’s past is considered to reflect rather badly on England. Perhaps inspiration might strike you.

Hitler was a nationalist, need I say more?

A sentiment CCO’B would echo. So long as we’re not talking about what we might term ‘Ulster-Scot’ nationalism, or other UK-centric varieties, of course.