Yesterday a 17-year-old was charged with the murder of Constable Stephen Carroll in County Armagh earlier this month. That incident followed the killings of two British soldiers by the Real IRA, in the wake of which I was asked by the Washington Post whether the case for a united Ireland should be reexamined. This is what I had to say:
A minority of a minority of a minority - a group of perhaps two dozen embittered extremists - kill a couple of British soldiers (the first time in 12 years) and wound two more and two Northern Irish civilians and you think it might be a good idea to concede their main, historic demand for which there is no majority support in Northern Ireland and no great enthusiasm in the Irish Republic.
I don't quite get it. The attacks are an aberration, although it has been known for some time that dissident republicans have been planning something. There is much that is wrong with the Northern Ireland settlement - and it is a shame that it had to be delivered in the end by the more extreme nationalists and unionists. But it has been delivered and it is working, even if protestants and catholics don't exactly go around hugging each other in the streets.
What has happened does not represent an upsurge in support for a united Ireland - on either side of the border. It is part of a complicated political game being played out on the extreme wing of republicanism. Sinn Fein's all-Ireland strategy of becoming a major electoral force both sides of the border received something of a setback in Ireland's 2007 general election, and it appears to be the Irish Labour party that is picking up the protest vote from the recession not Sinn Fein. And in Northern Ireland itself, Sinn Fein is "starting to look boringly respectable and even a little moth-eaten," according to Paul Bew, professor of Irish politics at Queen's university, Belfast. So it seems that a handful of rejectionists are exploiting the relative weakness of Sinn Fein - the main standard bearer of republicanism - to plant a bloody little flag of their own and remind people that there are still some people out there who prefer violence to constitutionalism.
