Squeezing the Moderates
When I hear the words Northern Ireland or Ulster on television or radio, I reach for the off button. All my adult life we have had the Irish problem. I should say that all my adult life in my mind, there has been one obvious solution, give Ulster to Eire.
I don’t make this decision on political grounds, but through strict economic grounds. I have been to Ulster a few times and it is an expensive place to live and to run a business. Energy is expensive for a start. So everything needs to be subsidised. I know it is the same in other far-flung parts of the UK, like the Highlands of Scotland and Cornwall, but they don’t spit the bile about everybody who disagrees with them, that many Ulster politicians do. I don’t ever remember them trying to bomb and kill their way to get their aims.
I know that the Protestants would bleat about the reunification of Ireland, but because of population dynamics with an increasing and younger Catholic population, that they will be in the minority in a few years anyway. How will the the Catholics vote?
I have just heard Ken Maginnis on Radio 5, eloquently complaining about how New Labour has played the extreme card and cut out the moderate Unionists and the SDLP in favour of Sinn Fein and the DUP. He has a point, especially, as his party was not at the current talks.
I read once that subsidies to help Northern Ireland cost about £3-4 billion a year. (If anybody has an up-to-date figure then please let me know!) But to move control of justice and policing to the province would have cost £800 million. If it was a subsidiary of a company it would have been declared bust many years ago.
Surely, this amount of money means that on the one hand a long term solution to Ulster must be found and that on our part, we put a proper, rather than a part-time minister into the province to make a deal that is fair for all stick.
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The Anonymous Widower 
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