I SHAN'T add to the comments and analyses of the Northern Ireland election results. Nor will I comment further on the Sinn Fein/IRA stance in relation to all party talks on June 10th.
Instead I will examine the factors that underlie the reluctance of political unionism to react more positively to the opportunity for peace that now exists.
The Northern Ireland problem has been marked, indeed considerably complicated, by a profound paradox which all of us, both North and South, nationalist and unionist, have been reluctant to recognise.
We all know that unionists resolutely reject the island of Ireland as a political unit and claim for Northern Ireland a separate cultural, political and economic identity.
On the other hand, nationalists in this State as in Northern Ireland oppose the political division of the island.
Yet at a deeper psychological level, both unionists and Southern nationalists think quite differently.
Unionists have never ceased to demonstrate fears that are peculiar to a threatened minority, rather than the kind of self confidence that goes with being part of a majority within a political entity.
This minority complex is explained by the persistent rejection of the Northern political entity, not just by the large Northern nationalist minority but most of all by the irredentism of our State, staking its claim to the territory of Northern Ireland, a claim which in 1937 was belatedly incorporated in our Constitution.
But if at the deepest psychological level this threat from the South has caused unionists to continue to think of themselves primarily as a minority, equally the vast majority of the people of this State, and most of our politicians, have since independence identified primarily with our new State rather than with the island as a whole.
It may have been otherwise for a brief period at the outset, at least so far as our political leadership was concerned.
But whatever may have been the case with individual Ministers such as Kevin O'Higgins, the Cumann na nGaedheal government as a collective body largely lost interest in the North after it had burnt its fingers with the Boundary Commission fiasco of 1925.
There were, of course, reasons for this shift of attention that government had a lot on its plate within this jurisdiction, including the rebuilding of an economy and infrastructure shattered by the physically destructive Civil War.
As for Fianna Fail, the truth is they were never really switched on, whatever may be claimed to the contrary and despite such gestures as the 1933 election of de Valera, then head of the Irish government, as an abstentionist member of the Stormont parliament, a position he held until the eve of the 1938 Anglo Irish Agreement.
Indeed de Valera made no secret of the fact that for him the ending of partition took third place.
His two primary concerns were the creation of an Irish speaking State in the South and the perfection of that State's already internationally recognised sovereignty through the elimination of the monarchical symbols that had continued to alienate those who had opposed the 1921 Treaty.
THE long running anti-partition campaign was initiated in 1949 by a coalition government fearful of de Valera's power to stir up feeling on this issue when in opposition.
It was designed to persuade or intimidate Britain into handing over the territory of Northern Ireland against the wishes of a majority of its inhabitants.
That campaign, which from the late 1940s onwards I consistently opposed in numerous articles at home and abroad, was futile, wrong headed and provocative.
Especially in the 1950s it served several disreputable purposes.
It assuaged a suppressed sense of guilt about the deep seated underlying partitionism of the South and the failure of our politicians to tackle effectively the real issue exposing and getting action taken to eliminate discrimination against the Northern minority.
And in the 1950s the anti partition campaign also won votes at election times by distracting attention from the way in which, during the period of most rapid growth ever experienced in western Europe, wrong headed policies created economic stagnation in the State.
Worse still, this disreputable campaign inadvertently re-stoked the fading embers of militant republicanism.
This became terrifyingly clear in March 1957 when the funeral of two IRA men killed in a Border raid drew huge crowds in Dublin and dozens of clergy to the grave side.
As a people we have signally failed to admit the extent to which the irresponsible rhetoric of that period both inspired a revival of the IRA and kept alive the fears of a unionist community that had never ceased to feel itself a threatened minority in this island.
And threatened indeed they were with absorption against their will into a State where triumphalist Catholicism then reigned supreme.
In addition, lacking a command of the Irish language their Southern co religionists were denied a school leaving certificate and the possibility of entering any part of the public service or professions such as teaching and the law.
These measures were not, of course, consciously intended to be discriminatory. But to many unionists that is how they appeared.
Because of the covert nature of the real and purposeful discrimination against Catholics in the North many unionists there were able to convince themselves, and also compliant British opinion, that such discrimination was a myth.
If we in this State had not placed the unionist community in the North under unremitting psychological pressure, would their attitudes to this State be as negative today as those graphically portrayed not just by the DUP but also by the UUP leader, David Trimble, in some of his recent speeches?
I doubt it.
Decades of anti-partition rhetoric played into the hands of past unionist leaderships, providing them with material out of which to construct an enduring Southern stereotype which has outlasted the changing reality of our State and society.
As a result not just unionist politicians seeking votes but many intelligent apolitical unionists retain a picture of our society and of our attitudes to the North that bears no relationship to reality.
A wall of orange glass continues to obscure their vision of our State.
And both we and they, but perhaps most of all the nationalist minority in the North whom we in the South abandoned in and after the 1920s, continue to pay the price of the failed Northern policies of our post revolutionary half century.
THE irrationality of unionist responses to the Anglo Irish Agreement of 1985 and to the Framework Document, and their negativism to the opportunities presented by the peace process, all reflect the distorting mirror through which they view every positive move from our State towards a solution designed to secure nationalist acceptance of the status quo in the North until and unless a Northern majority wishes to change it.
This distortion still inhibits unionists from identifying and pursuing their own long term interest.
That interest lies in a peaceful settlement that would involve a Northern Ireland remaining for the foreseeable future, in accordance with the wishes of its unionist majority, within the United Kingdom.
It would be governed for the benefit of all its people by an administration with minority representation, and policed successfully by a force commanding the respect and support of both communities.
And this reformed Northern polity could satisfy the aspirations of its nationalist community by joining on a footing of equality with the South in areas of common concern where such an arrangement could materially benefit Northern Ireland.