Like Any Other Part Of The United Kingdom

The DUP-Sinn Fein Axis (which calls to mind both the Nazi-Soviet Pact of old and the Neocon-Islamist Alliance of the present age) is refusing to block a grant of £1.2 million of your money and mine to the ghoulish "Ulster Defence Association", one of several notably undisbanded mobs of paramilitary gangsters on its patch.

Northern Ireland is now governed by a most unholy alliance between those who want their own little statelet but think that they are Unionists merely because they want its bills to be picked up by the British taxpayer, and those who act in full accord with their view that the Provisional Army Council of the IRA (a Council of which several of them are members) is the sovereign body throughout Ireland, yet who also still want you and me to pay for them and for their antics. We are all supposed to be delighted at this state of affairs, which results in decisions such as the one above.

The people of Northern Ireland, like those of any other part of the United Kingdom, need, want and deserve better than this. And now they will have it, not least including the very large number of Catholics in favour of the Union in principle and in tune with what might be called the post-Nationalist mood in the Republic today (but who have previously had to "choose" between the UUP with its affiliated Orange Lodges, and the militantly secular-liberal Alliance Party), and very large number who recognise that the social democracy they support and depend upon is only possible within the United Kingdom (and who have previously had to "choose" between the admittedly only High Tory UUP and the soundly Old Labour except staunchly Nationalist SDLP). Those Hobson's Choices are no more.