No, we shouldn't align ourselves with Unionists

In some corners of the Irish right, a trend has emerged in the last few years in which certain Southern "Nationalists" make a big fuss about supposedly burying the hatchet with Orangemen so that we can all work together in the grand struggle against mass immigration. "No more brother wars!" they cry, "United we stand against the Invader!"

It hasn't been uncommon recently when there's some sort of unrest in the occupied six counties surrounding migration, usually in the weeks flanking parade season, amongst the crowds of Unionists marching under the butcher's apron to find a lone shoneen, almost certainly not from the north, waving his tricolour to the amusement of international onlookers and only the most oblivious of his own countrymen.

Such sentiment seems to me as if it can only be honestly believed in the mind of someone who has never been north of Malahide, or someone who for some reason has just never been told anything about the history of Ulster. So indulge me as I give a quick recap.

Following the wave of Protestant mass immigration in the 1600s this population of foreigners has, non-exhaustively and in no particular order, been planted on lands stolen from Irishmen, murdered Irishmen who resisted this theft, massacred Irishmen who rose up against British rule, established a regime to exclude Irish Catholics from government, threatened and then enacted the partition of our country, and set up paramilitaries which killed almost exclusively Irish civilians. In short they have acted as brutal and slavish enforcers of foreign rule - hardly a group amenable to Nationalism.

Now, the sceptical among you may say something about how all of this is in the past, after all one of the main being made by these people is that we're not to be fighting any more. But this too is nonsense, the maniacal murder sprees of Loyalist paramilitaries during the troubles only ended as recently as the mid 90s, not exactly a dead and buried part of history. To this day, every 12th of July they erect bonfires to celebrate a foreign invasion and send all sorts of Irish symbols to the blaze.

Perhaps this vision of coming together with the people who annually burn tricolours and other Irish paraphernalia is genuinely motivating to some, but to most people such an alliance is nothing short of a repulsive betrayal of the National idea. As is obvious, the worst actions I just mentioned are those of a minority of Orangemen, but this is still how the vast majority of Irish people see them, it doesn't help at all that the type of Unionists most likely to attend your "cross-community" anti-migration protests mostly belong to this actively sectarian minority.

The primary cost of aligning ourselves with the Unionists, of course, is that we risk easily alienating a sizeable portion of Nationalists across the country and delegitimising our claim to the historical Republican struggle. How could we claim, with a straight face, to be the current manifestation of centuries of patriotic struggle if we're so quick to throw Reunification to the wayside for a cynical and fruitless truce.

Because after all, perhaps the most important question we should ask ourselves about such an alliance is "What does this actually achieve?" What genuine benefit is there to siding with the 2nd latest wave of planters against the most recent? I say none at all.

Immigration policy in the occupied six counties is determined entirely in Westminster, a body to which the North contributes 18 seats out of 650. Needless to say a grand unified front that somehow gets all 18 seats (and convinces Nationalists to take them, as they currently (rightfully) boycott Westminster) would still be completely at the mercy of whatever politicking happens in England.

Surely, then, the more logical course of action would be to convince the Unionists that their migration concerns are best addressed within a United Ireland, where Nationalists would have much more of a sway, and not by settling for the Stormont status quo where we are extremely unlikely to be kingmakers, but this isn't what I see happening.

I invite any proponents of this alliance to float a United Ireland run by us to their nearest Orangeman, maybe then will they finally understand the kind of people they're dealing with.

I think it is telling of the people who espouse this grand plan that I have yet to see a single Northern Catholic among their ranks. This has in part led to some extremely stupid takes, most recently with regards to the Garvaghy Road protests. Anyone who knows anything about the North could tell you that conflict is perennial, but when protests erupted over the parade commissions idiocy these all-seeing unifiers of the Northern communities declared that there was a conspiracy afoot!

Tweets like the above show the sheer insanity of these types. It achieves nothing but scaring normal people away from the right. I'm not a big man for conspiracies, but that's an article for another day as I've come up with my own one just for this, let's see which seems more plausible. Either 1, the unificationist theory: Someone stoked tensions between communities to ward off a coming together that, as I've discussed, would be extremely unlikely and would achieve nothing anyway, or 2, my own theory that I just made up: Someone is trying to trick the right into working with Orangemen in order to make us lose any appeal to Nationalists countrywide. I think we know which fits best into the MI5 playbook.