Sir, - I agree with Ruth Dudley-Edwards (Opinion, February 5th) that unionists may expect little understanding in Ireland at the present moment. Perhaps they are a reminder that the Republic's dreamless sleep during decades of oppression of its Northern fellow-citizens contributed more to the abysmal social conditions of Northern nationalists than did centuries of British maladministration.
Unionists are also an uncomfortable memento of the beginning of this century, when a considerable minority of people on this island were happy to serve in the Irish and British civil services, and the Irish regiments, and to advance within the Empire foreign and consular service, without any bar to their religion or nationality. It is perhaps an unpalatable fact that the Irish Catholic middle classes, eager then as now for wealth and power, were a main beneficiary of the employment and advancement offered within the now rejected "Union" of Britain and Ireland.
It is surely an irony of history that the very party formed so perfectly from that comfortable and privileged stratum of Irish society should now seem poised to reject such a relevant part of its own history. I would suggest, however, that unionists are, paradoxically, very useful - indeed essential - to the Republic's political parties, of whatever unripe tinge. They provide an image of the "Other", that strange and apparently different crowd which people insecure in their own identity need to hate. Hate is as powerful an adhesive as it is an explosive, for by violently rejecting the "Other", held to be the opposite of myself, I create a stable sense of my own identity, and thereby security.
Nationalism, a primeval form of self-determination more suitable to tribalism than to 21stcentury democracy, thrives on simplistic divisions, and cannot survive in a what should be a pluralist and liberal society. It needs the blood-stained soil of martyrs, the uncorrupted body of a motherland and an archaic belief that territory, however much an accident of history, is sovereign. It has, unfortunately, much in common with unionism.
As an alternative, perhaps we could consider that our uniqueness, our very "Irishness", is not something concrete and exclusive, inherited from the distant Arcadia of unpolluted Erin, but a matrix of history, a skein of split allegiances and divided loyalties. Perhaps our very identity is ultimately a metaphor, a singularity - forever fluid in this global world of change. - Yours, etc.,
Robert Vance, St David's Terrace, Glasnevin, Dublin 9.