(This is a new, comprehensively updated version of this post- it replaced the old version 11/5/20)
The title is a phrase created by Wolf Tone, a Protestant who is considered the founder of Irish Republicanism. He was the main leader of the 1798 Rebellion against British rule.
Initially this was going to just be about anti-Protestant bigotry and republicans, but it's now turned into more of a general discussion of the argument for a United Ireland. The part about anti-Protestant bigotry and republicans is in the second half of this post, and is part of the argument in favor of uniting Ireland.
One aspect of that argument is that Catholics are unlikely to experience justice or equality under British rule in Ireland. I won't go into many details, but here are some things that were done to the Irish before 1900:
1. There was the general practice of kicking people off their land.
2. The transportation of 10s of thousands who were sent to the Caribbean by Cromwell and worked under slave-like condition until they earned their freedom or died (many or MOST died (they usually lasted about 3-7 years)).
3. During the Famine, while 10-15% of the population starved to death and another 10-15% emigrated to avoid starving to death, food was being shipped out of Ireland to England.
4. For roughly 100-150 years, Catholics were stripped of more or less all the rights enjoyed by most or all Protestants (the details varied from right to right), under the Penal Laws.
After the War of Independence, during which the British were very brutal with the Irish, Ireland was divided. This was accompanied by great violence in the North against the Catholic community. In general I recommend the book "Northern Ireland: The Orange State" by Michael Farrell, and you can also read a good summary of what happened to Catholics the first fifty years of N. Ireland here (that also explains how N. Ireland’s creation was violent, sectarian, and undemocratic, and how the civil rights movement in the late 1960s transformed into a broad struggle for national liberation that included republicans).
During The Troubles, the Nationalist (Catholic) community went through a nightmare- probably the best way to briefly describe that is to say that while roughly 856+ Catholic civilians were killed in the years 1969 to 2005 by either loyalist paramilitaries or the security forces, a comparable scenario in America would have meant around 67,000 unarmed people of color killed by cops or Nazi skinheads (etc.) in the same time period (A: based on what I’ll describe below, I would guess that the actual number for that was probably somewhere around 7,000-8,000; B: I'm not saying the racist system in this country wasn't, ideologically or programmatically, capable of killing 67,000 people of color in those years if the "rebellion" among people of color here had been as militaristic as the one among Catholics in N. Ireland; but the reality is that as bad as it was for people of color here in those years, it was, in terms of deaths, MUCH worse for Catholics in N. Ireland). Although the security forces didn’t directly kill anywhere near as many Catholic civilians as the loyalists did, there was routine harassment and brutality experienced by the nationalist community at their hands. In the early 1970s Catholics were twice as likely to be unemployed as Protestants and in 1988 they two and and half times as likely. The maximum number of MPs they could expect was negligible in the Parliament, and they were governed by a state that they quite reasonably considered both foreign and hostile. On average 1969-1990 about 10 anti-Catholic parades each year were forced through Catholic areas by the security forces, which often prompted rioting and violence against Catholic residents. For why opposition to those parades is legitimate, see this.
There's a large pro-unity majority throughout the island, and about 90% of the Northern Catholic community, as well as about 5% of the Northern Protestant population also support that. Whatever right to national self-determination the Northern Protestants have is trumped by that of the Irish as a whole- the latter are relatively or completely indigenous, the former are the descendants of settlers.
During TheTroubles, a large chunk of the Republican Movement’s response to British Imperialism and Unionism is described here. In the 1990s the Provisional Republican Movement increasingly pursued an unarmed strategy.
On a related subject, the British Government was overwhelmingly responsible for the nightmare the Catholic community went through.
Looking at the 856+ murders of Catholic civilians (by either the security forces or loyalist paramilitaries), the vast majority were the work of loyalist paramilitaries, but there's evidence of collusion between the security forces and the loyalists, and even if that didn't happen, there's solid evidence that the security forces and the government took one attitude towards loyalists and another towards republicans.
On collusion, there have been allegations by credible human rights groups and there have been credible whistle-blowers. Part of the argument that there was collusion is that the security forces had agents in the loyalist paramilitaries and were not too worried about stopping them from killing Catholics, as proven by the following (all but the last item is from the Conflict Archive on the InterNet, a very neutral, academic site; the last is from the Pat Finucane Centre, who are so well respected, that they organized the main Bloody Sunday Commemoration events every year until recently, in Derry, an SDLP strong-hold; with the exception of the internment figures, which might be off a tiny bit, it's accurate (when I say "3-4" that's from me)):
1) The entire conflict, the security forces killed about 145 republican paramilitaries, and 16 loyalists. They killed 22 Protestant civilians, and 162 Catholic civilians.
2) In the early and mid 1970s, during internment without trial, 107 loyalists were interned, 1,874 republicans (and two leftists who were not republicans) were interned, and on average the republicans were interned longer because the first 1.5 years not a single loyalist was interned.
3) From it's formation in 1971 until 1992, the main loyalist paramilitary, the Ulster Defence Association, was considered a legal organization by the British government. In 1974, when the gov't finally got around to declaring Sinn Fein a legal organization, they "balanced that out" by declaring that the Ulster Volunteer Force, a loyalist paramilitary, was legal. That lasted for a year, during which the UVF was blamed for about 50 murders.
4) I can't find figures on sentenced prisoners, but considering that membership of republican paramilitaries was always illegal, odds are very high that there was something like 5-10 times more sentenced republican prisoners than loyalist sentenced prisoners.
5) In July 1996 during 5 days of loyalist rioting, 662 plastic bullets were fired; immediately after that, during 3 days of nationalist rioting, 5,340 plastic bullets were fired.
(That adds up to a double standard, and there’s some more solid evidence of collusion in a post here)
In general, there was probably something like 20 times more activity from republican paramilitaries than from loyalist parmilitaries (if you ignore the racketeering of the latter), and probably about a few times more rioting from Catholics than there was from Protestants. But the loyalist paramilitaries focused overwhelmingly on killing Catholic civilians and the IRA was focusing overwhelmingly on the security forces and (with very few civilian casualties) the destruction of civilian buildings (according to work I did here).
Initially this was going to just be about anti-Protestant bigotry and republicans, but it's now turned into more of a general discussion of the argument for a United Ireland. The part about anti-Protestant bigotry and republicans is in the second half of this post, and is part of the argument in favor of uniting Ireland.
One aspect of that argument is that Catholics are unlikely to experience justice or equality under British rule in Ireland. I won't go into many details, but here are some things that were done to the Irish before 1900:
1. There was the general practice of kicking people off their land.
2. The transportation of 10s of thousands who were sent to the Caribbean by Cromwell and worked under slave-like condition until they earned their freedom or died (many or MOST died (they usually lasted about 3-7 years)).
3. During the Famine, while 10-15% of the population starved to death and another 10-15% emigrated to avoid starving to death, food was being shipped out of Ireland to England.
4. For roughly 100-150 years, Catholics were stripped of more or less all the rights enjoyed by most or all Protestants (the details varied from right to right), under the Penal Laws.
After the War of Independence, during which the British were very brutal with the Irish, Ireland was divided. This was accompanied by great violence in the North against the Catholic community. In general I recommend the book "Northern Ireland: The Orange State" by Michael Farrell, and you can also read a good summary of what happened to Catholics the first fifty years of N. Ireland here (that also explains how N. Ireland’s creation was violent, sectarian, and undemocratic, and how the civil rights movement in the late 1960s transformed into a broad struggle for national liberation that included republicans).
During The Troubles, the Nationalist (Catholic) community went through a nightmare- probably the best way to briefly describe that is to say that while roughly 856+ Catholic civilians were killed in the years 1969 to 2005 by either loyalist paramilitaries or the security forces, a comparable scenario in America would have meant around 67,000 unarmed people of color killed by cops or Nazi skinheads (etc.) in the same time period (A: based on what I’ll describe below, I would guess that the actual number for that was probably somewhere around 7,000-8,000; B: I'm not saying the racist system in this country wasn't, ideologically or programmatically, capable of killing 67,000 people of color in those years if the "rebellion" among people of color here had been as militaristic as the one among Catholics in N. Ireland; but the reality is that as bad as it was for people of color here in those years, it was, in terms of deaths, MUCH worse for Catholics in N. Ireland). Although the security forces didn’t directly kill anywhere near as many Catholic civilians as the loyalists did, there was routine harassment and brutality experienced by the nationalist community at their hands. In the early 1970s Catholics were twice as likely to be unemployed as Protestants and in 1988 they two and and half times as likely. The maximum number of MPs they could expect was negligible in the Parliament, and they were governed by a state that they quite reasonably considered both foreign and hostile. On average 1969-1990 about 10 anti-Catholic parades each year were forced through Catholic areas by the security forces, which often prompted rioting and violence against Catholic residents. For why opposition to those parades is legitimate, see this.
There's a large pro-unity majority throughout the island, and about 90% of the Northern Catholic community, as well as about 5% of the Northern Protestant population also support that. Whatever right to national self-determination the Northern Protestants have is trumped by that of the Irish as a whole- the latter are relatively or completely indigenous, the former are the descendants of settlers.
During TheTroubles, a large chunk of the Republican Movement’s response to British Imperialism and Unionism is described here. In the 1990s the Provisional Republican Movement increasingly pursued an unarmed strategy.
On a related subject, the British Government was overwhelmingly responsible for the nightmare the Catholic community went through.
Looking at the 856+ murders of Catholic civilians (by either the security forces or loyalist paramilitaries), the vast majority were the work of loyalist paramilitaries, but there's evidence of collusion between the security forces and the loyalists, and even if that didn't happen, there's solid evidence that the security forces and the government took one attitude towards loyalists and another towards republicans.
On collusion, there have been allegations by credible human rights groups and there have been credible whistle-blowers. Part of the argument that there was collusion is that the security forces had agents in the loyalist paramilitaries and were not too worried about stopping them from killing Catholics, as proven by the following (all but the last item is from the Conflict Archive on the InterNet, a very neutral, academic site; the last is from the Pat Finucane Centre, who are so well respected, that they organized the main Bloody Sunday Commemoration events every year until recently, in Derry, an SDLP strong-hold; with the exception of the internment figures, which might be off a tiny bit, it's accurate (when I say "3-4" that's from me)):
1) The entire conflict, the security forces killed about 145 republican paramilitaries, and 16 loyalists. They killed 22 Protestant civilians, and 162 Catholic civilians.
2) In the early and mid 1970s, during internment without trial, 107 loyalists were interned, 1,874 republicans (and two leftists who were not republicans) were interned, and on average the republicans were interned longer because the first 1.5 years not a single loyalist was interned.
3) From it's formation in 1971 until 1992, the main loyalist paramilitary, the Ulster Defence Association, was considered a legal organization by the British government. In 1974, when the gov't finally got around to declaring Sinn Fein a legal organization, they "balanced that out" by declaring that the Ulster Volunteer Force, a loyalist paramilitary, was legal. That lasted for a year, during which the UVF was blamed for about 50 murders.
4) I can't find figures on sentenced prisoners, but considering that membership of republican paramilitaries was always illegal, odds are very high that there was something like 5-10 times more sentenced republican prisoners than loyalist sentenced prisoners.
5) In July 1996 during 5 days of loyalist rioting, 662 plastic bullets were fired; immediately after that, during 3 days of nationalist rioting, 5,340 plastic bullets were fired.
(That adds up to a double standard, and there’s some more solid evidence of collusion in a post here)
In general, there was probably something like 20 times more activity from republican paramilitaries than from loyalist parmilitaries (if you ignore the racketeering of the latter), and probably about a few times more rioting from Catholics than there was from Protestants. But the loyalist paramilitaries focused overwhelmingly on killing Catholic civilians and the IRA was focusing overwhelmingly on the security forces and (with very few civilian casualties) the destruction of civilian buildings (according to work I did here).
Only .3% of IRA operations resulted in civilian death and probably about 5% of their civilian victims were not innocent). Clearly, the greater threat to innocent life came from the loyalists. There’s also the fact that sectarian murder has more of a terroristic effect on the community being targeted than the occassional accidental death of civilians, and should be a higher priority for the State. There's no way that the total northern membership of republican paramilitaries during the internment period was anywhere near 18 times that of loyalist paramilitaries- maybe 2 or 3 times.
Although I don't know exactly what it is, if you count all the British monarchs and Prime Ministers the last 300-400 years, I'd be surprised if more than 1% were Catholic, and I know that starting somewhere about 300 years ago, the British monarch cannot be a Catholic, or (until very recently) married to a Catholic. It's also not insignificant that Tony Blair waited until he left office to convert.
What I have hopefully established is that there is little reason to believe that Catholics will experience justice or equality under British rule.
A lot of people seem to think that the republican struggle is anti-Protestant, and more generally, believe that Protestants in a United Ireland would probably be treated the way Catholics have been treated in N. Ireland. Here's why that's very unlikely (this is close to all the info on the subject that I'm aware of, but is probably FAR, FAR from an exhaustive list of everything indicating that it’s very unlikely):
On the Republican Movement:
1) There's a solid history of Protestants being involved (in the decades before The Troubles (which started in the late 1960s)), although in the Provisional IRA (formed in 1969, now known simply as the IRA) they may have been less common than was the case with other parts of the republican family during The Troubles and less common than in earlier history. But at least one and perhaps three PIRA martyrs were Protestant. And a senior officer in the Belfast Brigade in the 1970s was Ivor Bell, a Protestant.
2) The first chief of staff (leader) of the PIRA was basically 1/3-2/3 Protestant (he was raised Catholic, but one or both of his parents were Protestant). The one parent who I know was Protestant, her family was from Belfast (he was born and raised in England and his father was English) and she was the one who inspired him to identify as Irish.
4) Rita O'Hare was for many years a senior member of SF. Her father was a Protestant.
5) In the late 1970s, the PIRA collaborated with the Irish National Liberation Army, which from 1978-1980 was led by a Protestant.
6) Based partly on a fairly scientific look, only something like .005% of the PIRA's operations were sectarian murder (that rough estimate is based on a more solid estimate that only .2 of their operations resulted intentionally in civilian death, as I explain here). I'm pretty sure you could say roughly the same thing about other republican paramilitaries. With the PIRA, it's also signficant that a minority of their operations against the British involved great effort as they traveled to Britain and mainland Europe to attack British targets.
7) Billy Leonard is a Protestant and was an SF politician between 2004 and 2011, and some of that time he was an MLA (Member of the Legislative Assembly). He left in 2011 because of the financial aspect of being a SF politician. He felt there was some hostility towards him in SF but felt it had as much to do with his former membership in the security forces as it had to do with his religion.
8) In 2002, SF's Martin McGuiness, when he was N. Ireland Minister of Education, was praised by a political rival, the then-leader of the Irish Labour Party, for the work he did promoting integrated education.
9) Every year republicans commemorate Wolf Tone.
10) SF has almost always been willing to dialogue with anyone in the unionist/loyalist community. When they started contesting elections in the mid-1980s, if elected to local government they would take their seats which I think is evidence they were willing to try non-violent democratic engagement with their Unionist opponents.
11) When Gerry Adams attended the funeral of David Ervine, leader of the Progressive Unionist Party, he gave Ervine's widow a hug.
12) Some time around 2005-2009 there was a debate in Sinn Fein about the slogan "Brits out." I'm not sure how it ended, it's one of those things I missed when I took a break from following NI. The idea was that it was being widely mis-interpreted as referring not just to the British Army and government but also the Unionist population (which overlaps heavily with the Protestant population) and should be dropped. The thing is, SF does a fairly good job of making it clear they're not anti-Protestant and want the Unionists to stay, so I'm not sure if they should abandon it as some have argued (the idea is that the popular slogan isn't worth the damage it was doing).
The second part of this is the situation in the Republic. The state there is nowhere near as anti-Protestant as people think it is.
1) As far as I can tell, there's been almost zero anti-Protestant discrimination or violence.
2) Although most schools are heavily connected to the Church, and I have heard one situation where there was a problem, in general, as far as I can tell, Protestants are happy with the education system.
3) At one point Protestants were over-represented in the Parliament. Also, according to Michael Farrell's "Northern Ireland: The Orange State" (page 186) in the late 1940s, while Protestants were 6% of the South's population, they were 35% of public appointments.
4) Around 2005 there were at least several Orange Order marches that took place without any security problems.
5) Out of nine Presidents of Ireland, two have been Protestants.
6) Some people point to the situation with abortion and say that Protestant women will be disadvantaged. The thing is, while abortion is something like 99% illegal in the Republic, it was about 95% illegal in the North until recently. When the Abortion Act was extended to N. Ireland by the British Parliament it was over the objections of a majority of people there. And in fact, the Protestant population (at a political level) is a little bit more pro-life than the Catholic population (as evidenced by statements made during an Assembly debate on the subject in 2000 or 2001).
So, Protestants have very little to fear in a United Ireland, Catholics have much to fear in N. Ireland. And depending on when you start counting, most of the progress that has been made since the early 1990s has been made under a Labour government in London (yes, I'm saying something nice about Tony Blair, someone please shoot me). The British Tories have a past and present tight organizational relationship with the Ulster Unionist Party, and spent some time in Government dependent on the Democratic Unionist Party for support in Parliament. At the very most, there has been a small decline in sectarianism among Unionists, and just a couple years ago there was a 3-year crisis in the Peace Process largely because of lingering Unionist sectarianism. Now, tories in London are caving into them over new arrangements made necessary by Brexit. Brexit requires either a “Hard Border” in Ireland between north and south, or a new trading boundary in the Irish Sea between the North and Britain. As I explain here this represents an opportunity to move towards Irish Unity but could also cause the conflict to re-start. The British are moving, in the Fall of 2020, to create a Hard Border in Ireland in order to appease the Unionists.
One last part of this is that ending partition will almost definitely strengthen various left, progressive, liberal, and working-class movements. To some degree the border (which creates organizational divisions, with some exceptions), and the fact that 2-3 governments have to be lobbied, makes it more difficult to advance those agendas. In the North, there are certainly sectarian divisions (although often that's more accurately described as political instead of religious). Also, tons of people in both parts of Ireland who work on issues connected to the border would otherwise be spending more time on stuff like building unions, gay rights, etc. (they DO work on that stuff, and the border-related issues aren't necessarily much of a detour, but they kind of are). There's also a good chance that in the North, a lot of Protestant workers and progressives will stop voting for the Orange Tories and start voting Labour or something like that. Something similar will happen in the South, where the Center/Center-Right Fianna Fail gets a ton of working-class votes, partly because they're seen as good on the border. Unlike their sister parties elsewhere in Europe, the Irish Labour Party has only been in government as a jr. partner.
The above won't happen over-night, but within 1-2 generations as more and more Protestants realize that they will almost definitely not be victimized by religious bigotry (aside from the liklihood of a tiny number of incidents that would be nothing compared to what Catholics went through), this will happen. Anti-Catholic sectarianism will go down as they realize that they won't be mis-treated, and this will be helped by the elimination of practically all anti-Protestant bigotry as Catholics experience equality and justice.
Keeping the pressure on the British to leave Ireland is still important. Although I believe it should be gradual there should be a process with a guaranteed outcome of Irish Unity. And the sooner it starts the sooner it ends which is important because it’s not impossible that the UK could become fascist at some point and as bad as that would be for the British people, it would probably be even worse for Catholics in N. Ireland considering that a fascist government in London would be less responsive to Catholic complaints, more pro-British Army, and would have connections with the loyalist paramilitaries.
Ending partition is still very important.
Although I don't know exactly what it is, if you count all the British monarchs and Prime Ministers the last 300-400 years, I'd be surprised if more than 1% were Catholic, and I know that starting somewhere about 300 years ago, the British monarch cannot be a Catholic, or (until very recently) married to a Catholic. It's also not insignificant that Tony Blair waited until he left office to convert.
What I have hopefully established is that there is little reason to believe that Catholics will experience justice or equality under British rule.
A lot of people seem to think that the republican struggle is anti-Protestant, and more generally, believe that Protestants in a United Ireland would probably be treated the way Catholics have been treated in N. Ireland. Here's why that's very unlikely (this is close to all the info on the subject that I'm aware of, but is probably FAR, FAR from an exhaustive list of everything indicating that it’s very unlikely):
On the Republican Movement:
1) There's a solid history of Protestants being involved (in the decades before The Troubles (which started in the late 1960s)), although in the Provisional IRA (formed in 1969, now known simply as the IRA) they may have been less common than was the case with other parts of the republican family during The Troubles and less common than in earlier history. But at least one and perhaps three PIRA martyrs were Protestant. And a senior officer in the Belfast Brigade in the 1970s was Ivor Bell, a Protestant.
2) The first chief of staff (leader) of the PIRA was basically 1/3-2/3 Protestant (he was raised Catholic, but one or both of his parents were Protestant). The one parent who I know was Protestant, her family was from Belfast (he was born and raised in England and his father was English) and she was the one who inspired him to identify as Irish.
4) Rita O'Hare was for many years a senior member of SF. Her father was a Protestant.
5) In the late 1970s, the PIRA collaborated with the Irish National Liberation Army, which from 1978-1980 was led by a Protestant.
6) Based partly on a fairly scientific look, only something like .005% of the PIRA's operations were sectarian murder (that rough estimate is based on a more solid estimate that only .2 of their operations resulted intentionally in civilian death, as I explain here). I'm pretty sure you could say roughly the same thing about other republican paramilitaries. With the PIRA, it's also signficant that a minority of their operations against the British involved great effort as they traveled to Britain and mainland Europe to attack British targets.
7) Billy Leonard is a Protestant and was an SF politician between 2004 and 2011, and some of that time he was an MLA (Member of the Legislative Assembly). He left in 2011 because of the financial aspect of being a SF politician. He felt there was some hostility towards him in SF but felt it had as much to do with his former membership in the security forces as it had to do with his religion.
8) In 2002, SF's Martin McGuiness, when he was N. Ireland Minister of Education, was praised by a political rival, the then-leader of the Irish Labour Party, for the work he did promoting integrated education.
9) Every year republicans commemorate Wolf Tone.
10) SF has almost always been willing to dialogue with anyone in the unionist/loyalist community. When they started contesting elections in the mid-1980s, if elected to local government they would take their seats which I think is evidence they were willing to try non-violent democratic engagement with their Unionist opponents.
11) When Gerry Adams attended the funeral of David Ervine, leader of the Progressive Unionist Party, he gave Ervine's widow a hug.
12) Some time around 2005-2009 there was a debate in Sinn Fein about the slogan "Brits out." I'm not sure how it ended, it's one of those things I missed when I took a break from following NI. The idea was that it was being widely mis-interpreted as referring not just to the British Army and government but also the Unionist population (which overlaps heavily with the Protestant population) and should be dropped. The thing is, SF does a fairly good job of making it clear they're not anti-Protestant and want the Unionists to stay, so I'm not sure if they should abandon it as some have argued (the idea is that the popular slogan isn't worth the damage it was doing).
The second part of this is the situation in the Republic. The state there is nowhere near as anti-Protestant as people think it is.
1) As far as I can tell, there's been almost zero anti-Protestant discrimination or violence.
2) Although most schools are heavily connected to the Church, and I have heard one situation where there was a problem, in general, as far as I can tell, Protestants are happy with the education system.
3) At one point Protestants were over-represented in the Parliament. Also, according to Michael Farrell's "Northern Ireland: The Orange State" (page 186) in the late 1940s, while Protestants were 6% of the South's population, they were 35% of public appointments.
4) Around 2005 there were at least several Orange Order marches that took place without any security problems.
5) Out of nine Presidents of Ireland, two have been Protestants.
6) Some people point to the situation with abortion and say that Protestant women will be disadvantaged. The thing is, while abortion is something like 99% illegal in the Republic, it was about 95% illegal in the North until recently. When the Abortion Act was extended to N. Ireland by the British Parliament it was over the objections of a majority of people there. And in fact, the Protestant population (at a political level) is a little bit more pro-life than the Catholic population (as evidenced by statements made during an Assembly debate on the subject in 2000 or 2001).
So, Protestants have very little to fear in a United Ireland, Catholics have much to fear in N. Ireland. And depending on when you start counting, most of the progress that has been made since the early 1990s has been made under a Labour government in London (yes, I'm saying something nice about Tony Blair, someone please shoot me). The British Tories have a past and present tight organizational relationship with the Ulster Unionist Party, and spent some time in Government dependent on the Democratic Unionist Party for support in Parliament. At the very most, there has been a small decline in sectarianism among Unionists, and just a couple years ago there was a 3-year crisis in the Peace Process largely because of lingering Unionist sectarianism. Now, tories in London are caving into them over new arrangements made necessary by Brexit. Brexit requires either a “Hard Border” in Ireland between north and south, or a new trading boundary in the Irish Sea between the North and Britain. As I explain here this represents an opportunity to move towards Irish Unity but could also cause the conflict to re-start. The British are moving, in the Fall of 2020, to create a Hard Border in Ireland in order to appease the Unionists.
One last part of this is that ending partition will almost definitely strengthen various left, progressive, liberal, and working-class movements. To some degree the border (which creates organizational divisions, with some exceptions), and the fact that 2-3 governments have to be lobbied, makes it more difficult to advance those agendas. In the North, there are certainly sectarian divisions (although often that's more accurately described as political instead of religious). Also, tons of people in both parts of Ireland who work on issues connected to the border would otherwise be spending more time on stuff like building unions, gay rights, etc. (they DO work on that stuff, and the border-related issues aren't necessarily much of a detour, but they kind of are). There's also a good chance that in the North, a lot of Protestant workers and progressives will stop voting for the Orange Tories and start voting Labour or something like that. Something similar will happen in the South, where the Center/Center-Right Fianna Fail gets a ton of working-class votes, partly because they're seen as good on the border. Unlike their sister parties elsewhere in Europe, the Irish Labour Party has only been in government as a jr. partner.
The above won't happen over-night, but within 1-2 generations as more and more Protestants realize that they will almost definitely not be victimized by religious bigotry (aside from the liklihood of a tiny number of incidents that would be nothing compared to what Catholics went through), this will happen. Anti-Catholic sectarianism will go down as they realize that they won't be mis-treated, and this will be helped by the elimination of practically all anti-Protestant bigotry as Catholics experience equality and justice.
Keeping the pressure on the British to leave Ireland is still important. Although I believe it should be gradual there should be a process with a guaranteed outcome of Irish Unity. And the sooner it starts the sooner it ends which is important because it’s not impossible that the UK could become fascist at some point and as bad as that would be for the British people, it would probably be even worse for Catholics in N. Ireland considering that a fascist government in London would be less responsive to Catholic complaints, more pro-British Army, and would have connections with the loyalist paramilitaries.
Ending partition is still very important.
****************
What makes me confident about my statement “probably somewhere around 7,000-8,000”?
1. Between 1996 and 2005 according to the FBI there were 38 racist murders. I have read that the Department of Justice officially estimates that for every hate crime reported to the FBI there might be 20-30 that aren’t reported because not all local law enforcement agencies report such crimes to the FBI. So I came up with 1,140 for those years.
2. I heard that in a 12 month period during a 2014 (apparent) surge in police murders of black people including those of Eric Garner in NY, Tamir Rice in OH, and Michael Brown in MO among other highly publicized such cases, that around 200 black people armed or unarmed, had been killed by cops in America. Although I’m very open-minded about accusations that cops plant guns, this country also has a ridiculous number of guns.
3. Bear in mind that decades ago the number of people of color and the number of cops in this country were both smaller or much smaller than they are today.
4. If it’s worth much, about 10 years ago I read a huge amount of what the Southern Poverty Law Center put on their web-site in the previous 10-15 years. I also got an Ethnic Studies degree if that’s worth much.
5. There was little or no talk about “Brown Lives Matter” so I get the impression that very few Latinos/Latinas/Chicanos/Chicanas have been killed by cops in recent years (as far as I know, even Arpaio’s sheriff’s department in AZ didn’t kill a single such person) and that might reflect the situation in earlier decades. I have practically never heard of Asian-Americans being killed by cops. And if Native Americans were being killed at a high rate in the 80s and 90s I would have heard (a massive chunk of my major was Native American Studies).
UPDATE 6/9/21 I just found a Democracy Now! story relevant to this. It's
about the last 20 years, but there's a small overlap between that and
the period I was looking at Catholics and people of color (1969-2005),
and it's possible that what I said about this comparison is off a
little. Bear in mind that the figure I refer to in item #2 above came
from organizers of a Black Lives Matter protest.
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