Still living in state of servitude

THE dust will shortly settle on this presidential election.

Regardless of the outcome, the “holier than thou” attitude of the southern media, particularly its radio and TV stations, towards Stormont’s Deputy First Minister must leave a bitter aftertaste in the mouths of the Northern electorate. Perhaps there is nothing new in this for nationalists. But, for the Unionist people, there was a clear and unambiguous message: you may engage in the process of reconciliation with the main representatives of the nationalist people, but we have no such intention.

Whatever the impression given by the most strident among them, the southern media is far from pacifistic in matters of physical force.

Witness the continued disinterest in pursuing the British establishment to “open the books” on the 1974 Dublin-Monaghan bombings and other massacres, as called for by all the Oireachtas parties as recently as May 18 of this year. Undue deference continues to be paid to representatives of both the British and American governments, whose joint attack on Iraq has, according to the British medical journal The Lancet (08/09/11), resulted in a staggering 655,000 civilian deaths in a little over five years. It seems that, once again, only empires with their juggernaut killing machines have an incontestable right to physical force.

The lead-up to 1916 finds Ireland in a state of not just economic, but also spiritual, servitude and a return to the tipping of the forelock.

Billy Fitzpatrick

Ashfield Park

Terenure

Dublin 6W