Thank God for Alec Reid. He spoke for perhaps hundreds of thousands of Northern nationalists/republicans when he said that Catholics were treated almost like animals under Stormont, and compared the unionists to the Nazis.
Naturally, the BBC was besieged with phone calls in his support - and then besieged with phone calls denouncing his subsequent apology. For Alec Reid is worth listening to, if only for us to discover the historical and intellectual rubbish which fills the republican mindset.
The unionists gerrymandered, to be sure; the Nazis didn't bother having elections to gerrymander, but murdered, by the million. If Alec Reid's Clonard monastery had been in Warsaw, he would long ago have been sounding the bell with his skull, with his feet tied to the clapper-loop, while down in the courtyard below his fellow Redemptorists would already have met their redeemer.
Alec Reid is not alone is his fatuous historical musings, for comparisons between Auschwitz and the Maze have long since become an article of abiding republican faith. Over a million people were murdered at Auschwitz; but one republican prisoner was killed at the Maze - while trying to escape - by soldiers there (as one was at the Curragh). Meanwhile, two score prison warders were murdered by the IRA. The Maze's inmates had visitors and food parcels and were allowed to leave through the gate when their time was up; Auschwitz's guests left through the chimney. The inmates of Auschwitz didn't need to arrange a hunger strike; that was organised for them by the Nazi authorities.
So, of all the obscene bilge which is the republican intellectual staple, the comparison between nationalists of the North and the Jews of the Third Reich is truly the most disgusting - and also the most illuminating. For after all, apart from about three deluded Welshman and a couple of English toffs, just about the only allies that the Nazis had in these islands were the IRA.
And as illuminating in its own grisly way last week was the performance of Ian Paisley Jnr on BBC television when he refused to condemn the remark by a DUP colleague that the 5,000 people who had voted for the Sinn Féin candidate Alex Maskey in one election were "sub-human animals". Instead, he resorted to the Jesuitical mumbo-jumbo of what-aboutery, behind which both sides in the North relentlessly, remorselessly, and shamelessly take cover.
But perhaps worst of all is that this putrid self-pity and boastful victimhood are actually encouraged by Northern broadcasters. There is even one single, evil night when BBC schedules Hearts and Minds - more properly called "Heartless and Mindless" - not just once, but twice, just in case there's a tasty bit of bitterness you might have missed the first time round, as well as the pathologically divisive Let's Talk, aka "Let's Fight".
These programmes cater to the Northern addiction to blood-sport and division. It is their oxygen and their lifeblood. They don't want to agree. They are like delinquent children in a playground who only feel comfortable with aggression and suffering, and who don't have to be responsible or grown up, because that reliable, cretinous dupe the British taxpayer will always bail them out, will always repair the windows, will always rebuild the burnt-out classroom.
On the one hand you have the deluded theological wizards of Sinn Féin-IRA, uttering their articulate, pseudo-intellectual heathen spells, who have spent decades showing one group of people how much they love them by killing them. Yet for all their apparent learning, theirs is not intelligent behaviour, but the cultic dysfunctionalism of the deranged. On the other, you have the godless thuggery of loyalist paramilitary organisations, which produced human dregs such as Lenny Murphy, Billy Wright, Mad Dog Adair, and Jim Gray. These creatures make Sierre Leone's West Side Boys seem like a gathering of Mensa Buddhists, munching beans and intoning Siddharthan verses.
We in the Republic have nothing in common with those lunatics north of the drumlins, with their inane rantings over tribal differences, their endless rubric of falsified histories and their insatiable appetite for pretentious sociological cant.
Maybe we should find the rather clever Californian who invented the San Andreas Fault and commission him to design a comparable geological imperfection between us and the North. Then, in the dead of night, we could administer a slight tap with a tectonic hammer, and silently push away the North as we would a laden sewage-barge from a quayside. By dawn the North would wake and find itself drifting back to whatever wretched past it came from, as we headed in diametrically the opposite direction.
Yet instead of the tiresome bullies of the North being sent about their business to fester and fume somewhere cold and damp in the North Atlantic, they are still being feted by the two governments, their boundless hunger for more deference further encouraged (even if loyalist paramilitaries think "deference" is the middle word of the UDA).
When will we learn that we can do nothing with the wizards and nothing with the goons? So let the green druids gather round the watchfires of republican sacrifice, urged on by their own, cursing, wild-eyed chaplains.
Let the loyalists mumble their very own brand of illiterate gibberish, occasionally killing one another in a sort of perverse and ritualised re-enactment of the good old days when stiffing helpless fenians was the sport of kings. As groups, they are both utterly beyond remedy, and no power on earth can transform them. We should not even try.