"Are you still saying a United Ireland should be imposed against the will of the majority?"
No, I am not, and I have never suggested such a thing -IF YOU ARE CLAIMING I AM, WHERE HAVE I MADE SUCH A SUGGESTION?
I am saying that whatever the future of the six counties it must be governed on behalf of all the people who live there, not just a dominant, self-serving majority.
The violence has come from all sides of the divide, the nationalists, the loyalst, but in particular, from the British.
Quick run-down of their track record
Easter Week 1916 The rebels had to be escorted under a protective guard to save them from the mobs of Dubliners demanding to know why they weren't fighting "with our lads in France".
Instead of sticking the leaders in Frongock with the rest of the rebels, where history would have remembered them as fanatical eccentrics, they were systematically executed, giving 'the cause' exactly what it needed - martyrs - and the most powerful symbol ever - a badly wounded Connolly strapped in a chair to enable him to face the firing squad. Result guerrilla warfare leading to an inevitable settlement.
The despatching of military thugs to soften up the population for an acceptible (to the British) treaty - result, a British-run terrorist campaign of arson, murder, torture - and the first Irish Bloody Sunday when troops fired on an unarmed football crowd, killing fourteen.
A treaty backed up by a threat of military invasion - result, civil war and a hostile division of Ireland with a government in the north committed to 'a Protestant State' leaving the Catholic third without representation, no proper voting rights, poor housing, high unemployment, anti-catholic riots and burnings which lasted into the late fifties.
Civil Rights marches baton charged by police and attacked by protestant mobs- result, a revival of the IRA as an effectively armed body, another Bloody Sunday, open wafare of the streets of Derry, Belfast and several major cities in mainland Britain - twenty-odd years of bloodletting.
Overall result, an unstable state still dominated by a beligerant, though reduced majority.
Ireland is geographically, culturally, and historically one country - the decision to partition it was a political one and it patently hasn't worked.
The only way it will work is with the goodwill and agreement of all the people of Ireland arrived at openly as a whole - it has not got that.
Unification is inevitable; the only things in question is when and the size of the body count between now and then.
Jim Carroll