Last week you were told that Castlederg had recorded the highest September temperature here, 28C, and had broken the previous Northern Ireland record of 27.6C set in Armagh in 1906.
The first part of the sentence is true; the second isn’t. There was no sub-polity the British had designated Northern Ireland in 1906. Armagh hitting 27.6C in 1906 was of no geographical significance except to Armagh. The highest September temperature in Ireland was also recorded in 1906, 29.1C in Kildare. It still stands.
However, most media outlets followed the lead of the local BBC in extending Northern Ireland’s existence backwards in time instead of searching for a record high temperature at a date post 1921 for Castlederg to break.
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It’s a type of pro-unionist acculturation, the unthinking assumption of the north as a pre-existing entity rather than an area artificially contrived with no geographical or economic basis. It was, quite simply, a tribal reservation; as Sir James Craig’s brother Charles said: “The largest area we [unionists] can hold.”
The north’s existence as a sub-polity produces a type of doublethink among unionists. It must be resolutely separate, particularly from the south, tied to Britain but also simultaneously politically separate from Britain.
Unionism has to maintain political separateness in case its Westminster government imposes something unionists don’t like, especially if it means living on equal terms with the rest of the people on this island, or worse, with their fenian neighbours in the north – or the Protocol.
This unionist doublethink manifests itself in many ways often inimical to people’s prosperity here and their health and wellbeing, but what the hell, as long as ‘our wee country’ remains separate from the south in all ways – the primary concern.
This ostrich-like behaviour means hostility to any all-island project of any kind, economic, sporting, health, education.
There are more than economic considerations. Ten days ago the UN published its 2023 Report on Global Invasive Alien Species (IAS). These are plants or animals introduced deliberately or accidentally into another ecosystem.
They become established and then proceed to take over the ecosystem, overwhelming native plants and causing extinction of native animals. The familiar example is the grey squirrel. Other threats are ash die-back and lately, the Asian hornet which destroys beehives.
Ireland has no national biosecurity plan to deal with these threats. As a result, the Republic has been referred by the EU Council to the European Court of Justice for not implementing European plans to prevent IAS spreading.
As Collie Ennis of Trinity College Dublin Zoology department says: “We are an island nation and we should be watching what’s coming past our borders.” You can see what’s coming can’t you?
Last year a report, IAS in the Republic of Ireland, compiled by experts north and south (including QUB), recommended a single all-Ireland body to prevent the arrival of IAS in the country, a proactive rather than reactive strategy.
These proposals are given added importance by the cavalier approach the British government is taking towards imports because, outside the single market and customs union, they haven’t erected any controls and have postponed such plans for the fifth time. It gives new meaning to the Protocol and the need for checks at ports in the north if Ireland is to remain as a phyto-sanitary unit as it has since the nineteenth century.
The question arises of course whether, in the absence of devolved administration, the unionist-dominated NIO will join any all-Ireland body designed to prevent IAS, especially since it will be administering EU rules.
