To ally with one’s enemies betrays a total abdication of your initial moral position. If your beliefs are up for negotiation, or your morals are guided by convenience, then you are liable for subversion and misdirection. As the Provisional movement discovered, when “everything is a tactic” and there are no inviolable principles, you quite soon find yourself defending what was anathema to your younger self. Had you told Sean MacStiofain, Ruairi Ó Bradaigh, Billy McKee or Daithi Conaill that the Provisional Movement would surrender its arsenal, shake hands with the Queen, recruit for the RUC and draw a wage from British taxpayers, they would have had your knees beaten in.
There is not and nor can there ever be rapprochement between Irish nationalists, of which we account ourselves, and the Loyalist Community. Our ancestors were driven from the land, pitch-capped and tarred, tortured and killed, by the very Settler-Colonials which some now seem determined to ally.
This is not mere “history”, not something to simply “get over.” Britain maintains a colonial garrison in our homeland, a Partition which Irish nationalism has always held as immoral and evil.
The reaction in England to the killing of innocent children is entirely reasonable, this is a war for your own survival and we, like all western Nationalists, wish for England to be English. May God give strength to your hands, Englishmen.
But we will never compromise on the position that the Six Counties are wrongfully occupied, and we will have no friendship or alliance with a group that seeks to perpetuate the existence of the statelet called Northern Ireland.
We no more need an alliance with Loyalist death squads than we need iron nails in our spines. Would those who suggest “unity” with Northern Loyalists suggest that we ally with the Jews against Islam, or Muslims against Judaism?
Where does one draw the line when the overriding argument is “convenience”?
No, the only clear line is the original moral position: we believe the Irish Nation lives, as all Nations live. Therefore, we shall have owe no allegiance to any power which seeks to deny that claim, and we have no friendship with any who oppose that claim and that includes the misbegotten fools that sauntered into UDA pubs and made a mockery of Irish nationalism.
