John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Like the last speaker, I am a member of the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly and it is one of the most worthwhile and valuable things I have undertaken in my time in the Dáil.

Like previous speakers, I want to generously congratulate Michelle O'Neill on her appointment and election as First Minister and Emma Little-Pengelly, as her deputy First Minister. It is almost an understatement to call it a unique day for nationalism on this island and it is one the deputy First Minister embraced with great dignity and a sense of nobility. It is a day people of my generation never thought they would see and it has almost come and gone without a real sense of ownership of it and not in a triumphalist way. It is a landmark occasion.

A colleague who is an English MP and a member of the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly made a comment to me at one of our recent meetings which I found interesting. It marked for me, on reflection, how things have changed on this island. He made the point the Republic was a cold house for Protestants. I said there were some who would say it is a cold place for Catholics in recent years. Clearly, it was a cold place for Catholics for hundreds of years. I do not want to get into the arguments about that but things have moved, changed and evolved.

It often amuses me how some in this House have felt a sense of ownership of the term "republicanism", which I have found offensive. I am an Irish republican and people in this House, particularly on the other side of the House, will have to accept there are many republicans in the House who do not sit on that side and that there are different shades of republicanism on this island. We live on an island where we now see there are nationalists who want to remain part of the United Kingdom, nationalists who want to be part of a united Ireland and unionists who want to be part of a united Ireland. This is a fluid, flexible position.

I grew up in a country where the tricolour was associated too much with politics. It was not until 1988 and the European Championships in soccer that Irish people in the Republic were able to embrace the tricolour for what it was, which is a symbol of our country. It had been sullied in the eyes of some people and used as a political weapon and to make a political statement.

It was difficult in previous times to say those kinds of things so it is an indication of how far we have come.

Deputy McAuliffe referred to conversations in his contribution. A number of conversations need to be had, and I think we are moving slowly beyond the position where conversations are stopped because they are too combustible. We are approaching a level of maturity where we can talk about things on this island without losing our heads. There are some conversations that were never had, including in the Republic. For so long, many people on the other side of the House and even some on this side of the House have thought a united Ireland is colonisation in reverse, where we absorb the unionist and Protestant population into a republic, and that is the end of it. I call it the “Ireland's Call” conundrum in that there is still a large section of the population of the Republic who do not understand why we have “Ireland’s Call” as an anthem representing an all-Ireland team and who wonder why Amhrán na bhFiann is not played. Although I am not mad about “Ireland’s Call”, that is just the politics of it. I wonder how many people would compromise on the national flag or the national anthem if we were designing a flag or anthem that embraced the Thirty-two Counties or embraced Protestant, Catholic, dissenter and all the traditions.

I think of the conversations that were not had. There are angry nationalists and republicans in the North - the Six Counties - who feel they were abandoned by Governments in the Republic. There are people in the Republic who would love to have that conversation too, and who feel the Irish Government was bullied by an intransigent British Government that simply would not tolerate or countenance any input from an Irish Government. There are many republicans in the Twenty-six Counties who looked on in shock, torment and distress at what was happening in the Six Counties of the North. We have not had these conversations to allow people to express their anger and also for people in the Republic to say that this is what it was like for us when we were building a republic here too, a very fragile republic.

These are important conversations. They are part of the colourful and intensely complex residue of colonisation, which is an imperial form of abuse. To attack each other and to fall out with each other is actually to fall into a further trap of imperialism and colonisation. The only people who win are the people who continuously seek to divide us and highlight the difference between me, on this side of the House, and Deputies on the other side of the House, when there is very little that separates us. I am a republican and other Deputies are republicans but, very often, people seek to divide on very nuanced lines. The only losers are Irish people and republicans who value the conversation that is going on.

I am grateful for the opportunity to put those kinds of thoughts on record for the first time in my eight years as a TD. I look forward to further conversations and to listening to what my colleagues on the opposite benches have to say.

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